🚀 go-pugleaf

I'm very confused about how the 1040 memory is used up, and I would distinctly
appreciate some help figuring out what is going on ...

Basically, to cut a very long story short, I have two pieces of software that
are supposed to tell me how much free RAM I have at any given time.  Neither
of them are things I trust particularly, especially since they are never in
agreement (one would not expect them to be in agreement, since being different
programs they take up different amounts of memory to run:  however, they do not
disagree in the right way:  the smaller program consistently reports less
memory than the large one).  I decided to try to figure out why I always seemed
to have less memory than I thought I would on a megabyte machine (why, for
instance, I can never allocate a buffer larger than 32K with Uniterm, and even
that is very rare;  and other similar problems).  So I booted with a disk that
did not have any desk accessories on it or anything in an auto folder.  The
only thing it had on it was the program STSHELL.TOS that was included on one
of Compute!s Atari ST disk magazines (issue one).  This program is 23447 bytes,
and has no resources, being a non-GEM program.  The amount of memory it said
I had free was 912476 (if I put it in an AUTO folder, it gives me 938106,
presumably since the AUTO folder is run prior to GEM's being loaded, suggesting
that GEM uses 25K of RAM).  This means that the operating system (including
GEM), is apparently using 136100 (more than 133K) of RAM.  This seemed a little
surprising to me.

Two specific questions:  is this amount of 133K consistent with other people's
experiences, or with any technical documentation out there?  Also, how do the
desk accessories work:  I assume they are permanently in memory, but that the
change one gets by actually running them is due to their allocating buffers and
so forth?  How does that work?

		thanks,

									JJMG