🚀 go-pugleaf

orc@pell.com (Orc) wrote:
> In article <DC8s5E.Bv1@ecf.toronto.edu>,
> PISCHKE  DAVID <pischke@ecf.toronto.edu> wrote:
> >In article <3v0ue9$9ls@sashimi.wwa.com>, G <blackbob@sashimi.wwa.com> wrote:
> >>This, of course, is false.  The Amiga multitasked just fine using
> >>just floppies.  The original implementation of UNIX also had one
> >>megabyte of disk (compare to Macintosh with two floppies).  Minix
> >>is a complete UN*X clone which runs on XT's with two 360k floppies
> >>(one can even recompiled the kernel in this system).  Etc.
> >Early Macintoshes had 128K of RAM and one 400K floppy drive.  The Amiga, when
> >it first came out, have 256K of RAM and one 880K floppy.
> >Are you telling me you can fit a pre-emptive multitasking operating system
> >into 128K of RAM and 400K of disk space, and still have room left for 
> >an application, its support files and documents?  I find that hard to
> >believe!
>    Why?   If you've got the hardware, all it takes is some sensible
> kernel coding to protect critical areas, the code to swap processes
> in and out, and, hopefully, some code to handle semaphores so multiple 
> people can chatter at the same thing at the same time.  Of course you
> have to have the hardware, and in 1984 the price of a good mmu would
> have made the Mac a whole lot more expensive.



When QNX first came out (http://quics.qnx.com) in 83, it ran from
a single 360k floppy on a 256k system. It had preemptive multitasking,
a good C complier for the time, and applications could be developed
using the floppy for temporary storage (admittedly when I got a hard drive
and extra RAM a few months later it did make it a lot better to use.