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From: info-vax@ucbvax.ARPA
Newsgroups: fa.info-vax
Subject: Re: getting small
Message-ID: <4222@ucbvax.ARPA>
Date: Wed, 16-Jan-85 15:04:42 EST
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.4222
Posted: Wed Jan 16 15:04:42 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 17-Jan-85 13:22:08 EST
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.ARPA
Organization: University of California at Berkeley
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From: fortune!redwood!rpw3@UCB-VAX

+---------------
| From: Provan@LLL-MFE.ARPA
| Gee, I must be getting old.  I remember when "small" meant 10K.
| If you guys want small, find one of those.  If you want user
| friendly, buy lots of memory.  But don't go around bragging
| about 2439K systems being "small".
+---------------

Both referenced systems included not just the operating system kernel,
but a complete systems utility environment, spoolers, editor, etc.

I appreciate "small". OS/8 (for the PDP-8) was delightful, even with just
8K words of memory and running on floppies.  And the in-memory kernel was
just 256 words (384 words on 12- to 32-K machines).  But even OS/8 was bigger
than 10K, if you include BUILD, TECO, BATCH, PRINT, PIP, the command decoder,
etc., for a fair comparison.  Try several hundred K, or most of an RX02 floppy.
(And yes, that's still smaller than 2439 K.)


Rob Warnock
Systems Architecture Consultant

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