Steve Nickolas <usotsuki at buric.co> wrote:

> On Sat, 25 Feb 2017, Larry McVoy wrote:
> > Back in the days of 4MB SPARC machines (and 68K machines) we joked
> > that EMACS stood for Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping.  David
> > Rosenthal, a Sun DE, was known for running emacs on the bitmapped
> > console in terminal mode so as to not let X11 or NeWS eat up ram.
> >
>
> From that nickname I came up with "Enough Memory A Concept Strange", as 8 
> MB was no longer a lot of memory.

On my Sun-2/50 at home and my 3-50 at work, I edited in console mode when I was 
working on drivers - just because launching Sunview did take too much time and 
I needed to reboot frequently. Note that I could not load the driver when I was 
e.g. working on the kbd driver.

I stopped with this kind of usage once the console on sparc systems came up and 
has been too slow. OK there was a hack to copy the FORTH boot code into RAM to 
make it faster, but it still has been slower than the Sun2 or Sun3 machines.

Memory was definitely not a problem on Sparc systems as the Sparc systems I 
used never had less than 16MB of RAM (usually 64MB). I started with what I call 
a "SparcStation-1-" at home, an engineering sample delivered aprox. 9 months 
before the official Sparcstation-1 launch that used a TI Floatingpoint 
processor with a gate array adaptor on a piggy back rather than the official 
Weitek chip.

> Disclosure - never was an EMACS person, or a vi person, pico was and nano 
> is more my cup of tea.  That said, I can fumble my way around vi if I 
> absolutely must.

I do not know EMACS well enough to use it and I know vi for emergency only. I 
usually use my VED (see schilytools).

Jörg

-- 
 EMail:joerg at schily.net                  (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
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