Re: OT: Computers-memory-lane.... [Was: [gentoo-user] Re: How low can you go?]

[Joost Roeleveld]

On Monday 04 April 2011 11:13:58 Pandu Poluan wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 16:04, Joost Roeleveld <joost@××××××××.org> wrote:
> > On Sunday 03 April 2011 15:13:09 luis jure wrote:
> >> on 2011-04-03 at 10:47 Neil Bothwick wrote:
> >> >It's been done on a C-64, but I think a 3.5KB box with no mass storage
> >> >might be a little too challenging.
> >>
> >> 3.5? wow, i always thought that the name meant it had 20K... like the
> >> C64 and C128. but no. now, almost 30 years later, i learn that it had
> >> 5K, 1.5 of them used by the system (you wouldn't want to leave the
> >> system without ram, would you?)
> >>
> >> i never had a vic-20 (my first computer was the atari st-1040 in 1988),
> >> but a friend of mine had one in the early 80's and i always wondered at
> >> all the things you could do with the thing. i couldn't program, so i
> >> used to sit next by him telling him my ideas for a program for
> >> algorithmic composition, that he tried to code.
> >
> > Nice, a walk down memory lane :)
> > The first computer we had at home (apart from an IBM my dad borrowed a
> > few times) was an Atari 1040 ST.
> > We got it in 1986 and I can't even remember all the things I did with it.
> > It came with a copy of GFA Basic. This was a bit like C or Pascal, but
> > then with Basic commands.
> > No line numbers, a decent editor and a compiler and linker. I could mix
> > machine-code, basic-code and C-code into a final program to get a faster
> > result.
> >
> > The machine still worked last time I tried it and is currently still
> > stored at my parents with strict instructions not to throw it away :)
>
> Oh, the nostalgy... :-)
>
> My first computer I believe was an Apple ][, a hand-down from an
> uncle. It ran only for 1-2 weeks before it went to the Bit Bucket in
> the Sky.

That's sad, only 2 weeks...
A friend of my dad got us an apple-emulator, had a game I played a lot untill 
I found out that the game was incomplete and would always crash at the same 
point. It was a point-click adventure...

> Then my parents got me an Atari 800XL. That's where I cut my
> programming teeth with its built-in BASIC.

Yes, the old days with Basic. I wonder if I still have the old programs... The 
3.5" floppy-disks are still around somewhere..

> When its floppy drive (5.25") gave up the ghost, I got another
> hand-down; a PC-XT compatible no-name with a huge (at that time) 20 MB
> hard disk.

2nd one we had was a 386sx-16mhz with 2 mb ram and 40mb harddrive.
I did try to install linux on that once, but the network-install took forever.
The NIC could do 10mbit half-duples (coax), but effective speed was less.
Symptoms:
download 1KB at full speed
card crashed
driver resets after 5 minutes
... repeat...

That was in 2.0.x kernels and I think I saw a change-log where that driver 
finally got fixed in 2.6.0 (could be mistaken on that. It was an Intel 
Etherlink-16)

I don't have that card anymore.

> Again, it died after serving me & my brother for a couple of years,
> and we got a "PC Brand 486 SLC" desktop. And there I dabbled in Pascal
> and ASM, making replacement drivers for MS-DOS :-P ... I still
> remember tuning QEMM386.sys trying to eke the last bytes of Low
> Memory...

What's the most low-memory you could get it and still use it?
I managed to get low memory to around 634KB (If I remember correctly) using 
the memory-tools that came with Norton Utilities at the time.

> Afterwards, I started university, and its a blur of PC clones (and
> Windows 9x)... and I shifted mental-gears to become a network engineer

When did you switch to Linux?

I switched when MS Windows 95 crashed once too many and decided to delete some 
files along with it. I didn't bother fixing that installation and eventually 
reclaimed the diskspace and removed it from /etc/lilo.conf.

--
Joost