From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-Id: <200204230831.JAA21700@cthulhu.dircon.co.uk> Subject: Re: [9fans] An old laptop In-Reply-To: from Russ Cox at "Apr 22, 2002 12:31:27 pm" To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu From: Digby Tarvin MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Tue, 23 Apr 2002 09:31:36 +0100 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 79d6aa46-eaca-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 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