Re: [9fans] An old laptop

[Digby Tarvin <digbyt@acm.org>]

Hi Russ,

> Do you mean "terminal server" or just "terminal"?
> If the former (as in serial concentrator), you
> might be able to pull something off, but it seems
> unlikely.

I was thinking the latter - appologies if I didn't get the Plan9
terminology wrong..

> If the latter, I think you're out of luck.  The
> graphics for 640x480x8 are already 300 kilobytes,
> probably 600 once you have some windows.

Ah, and you just reminded me that with memory limits of this
generation machine, it may well be that the display is not 8 bits
deep, which presumably would be a killer too.

> Mail, acme, plumber, fs, and rio are all at
> least half a meg each.  And then the kernel and kfs
> will want some memory too.  It might fit, but
> you wouldn't be able to breathe.
>
> The install certainly won't work on it -- the install
> needs 32MB of memory.  The in-memory file system itself
> is almost 4MB.
>
> Doesn't seem worth it to me.
>
Thanks for your advice. It was the 32MB requirement for installing that
had a faint recollection of, and sounds like a bit of a killer unless
I install on the disk from another host.

It does sound like I would be banging my head against a wall a bit trying
to get some use out of the little beast - I just hate throwing away a
machine which works :-/

I can't say I thought of Windows 3.11 as a lean, efficient operating system
when I got the laptop, but it sounds like it was relatively speaking..

I still remember when a 5MB hard disk was a big deal and 64K was a
'theoretical' memory expansion limit. But admittedly that was before
graphical user intefaces became common.

I am sure I remember Rob Pike giving a talk to AUUG in Sydney a long
time ago, which included a demo of Plan9 running entirely from a floppy.
I guess it has grown a little since then..

It sounds like the best application for this old machine would be a non-
graphical system, like BSD without X, or OS-9000 - the latter is an
evolution of a real-time multi-user time sharing system originally running
on a 6809, and is still lean enough to make such an old beast feel like
it has limitless resources.

Thanks again for your comments.

Regards,
DigbyT
--
Digby R. S. Tarvin                                              digbyt@acm.org
http://www.cthulhu.dircon.co.uk