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

[Joost Roeleveld]

On Monday 04 April 2011 11:49:02 Pandu Poluan wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 16:35, Joost Roeleveld <joost@××××××××.org> wrote:
> > On Monday 04 April 2011 11:13:58 Pandu Poluan wrote:
> >> 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...
>
> Okay, I have to be honest: I LOL-ed at that... xD

I do as well, now...
At the time, I was rather annoyed as I, at the time, made a really good effort 
finding a decent network card (so I thought) and had to drag that thing into 
uni by public transport during rush hour...

> >> 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.
>
> I don't really recall... but around the same number, I guess.
> 630-something.
>
> Actually, I once managed to get 639KB, but lots of apps became
> unstable, so I went slightly more conservative :-)

I spent all that effort just to be able to play the occasional game. Most of my 
programming was, at the time, still done on the Atari. I did use them side-by-
side for a while.

> >> 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.
>
> Too many apps* I use day-by-day have only Windows version, so I never
> did switch to Linux :-(

There are plenty of games also available for Linux.
When I started with Linux, one of the popular ones was "xtris".
For the people who don't know it, it's a networked version of tetris where, 
when one player clears a line, or multiple lines, an equivalent number of 
junk-lines would appear at the bottom of a random different player.

In the end there were 2 versions in use.
One was binary-only with an ID-code only allowing connections from other 
binary-only clients.
The other one was more open.
The reason for the binary-only was due to some complaints about "cheating" 
where people added additional keys to do all kinds of different things like:
- bounce junk to next player
- ignore junk-message
- send junk to others
- select next piece to be available

These, however, were all modified by the actual player.

For more "modern" games, there are plenty that run natively on Linux. Either 
ported/created by the original developers or ported by a third party.

> First time I ever deployed Linux for day-to-day work was when I
> started an IT Training company with my former professor. We installed
> Fedora Core but replaced the UI with xfce.
>
> However, not until Ubuntu Hardy did I finally got serious about
> migrating to Linux. Currently am still migrating the non-legacy
> servers to Linux from Windows

Good luck with that. I know about the difficulty with that if some apps use ms-
windows specific "tricks"

> * please consider "games" as "apps" :-P

Games are applications, yes...
Just a very specific type.

--
Joost