Re: OS noise [Was: a hole in PGP]

[stewarts@ix.netcom.com (Bill Stewart)]

>On Mon, 31 Jul 1995, Phil Fraering wrote:
>
>> For better or for worse, we all must use programs (or collections
>> of programs) that large or larger: even if PGP could be implemented
>> in 1 % of the current source code, it would still be running in an
>> operating system that's cramped in 4 megabytes of ram, because that's
>> a characteristic of the common modern operating systems.
>
>Ahem!  Commiedore APOLOGIED when it released its 512K OS a couple of 
>years ago.  These things _don't_ have to be this large.

Foo.  Unix used to work just fine in 64K+64K split I&D space on a PDP-11 :-)
It got bigger when lots of stuff was added, especially networking and 
X windows, and I wouldn't want to go back to small machines.  

However, during one such discussion on comp.unix.wizards or wherever,
Dennis Ritchie posted a nice article about "Mine is smaller than yours",
saying "here's how big my OS is" (I think ~250K, and the OS was 8th or 9th
Edition),
"telnet over to foovax, it's this big", "datakit over to barmips, it's that
big",
"some other networking method over to some other machine, it's that big",
"yet another protocol over to yet another bigger machine", 
"display size of the operating systems on my 256K Blit and Gnot terminal, etc.

And QNX's kernel fits just fine inside the cache on a 486,
though it wouldn't actually stay there much.
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# Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts@ix.netcom.com
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