Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Unix for Atari 8-bit
Message-ID: <1990May28.155038.20674@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <20321@nigel.udel.EDU> <6719@star.cs.vu.nl> <1990May27.213330.11881@utstat.uucp>
Date: Mon, 28 May 90 15:50:38 GMT

In article <1990May27.213330.11881@utstat.uucp> geoff@utstat.uucp (Geoff Collyer) writes:
>> Unix v7, upon which Minix is based, was capable of running quite well
>> on a 64K machine (PDP 11/34)...
>
>Actually, V7 was a bit cramped in the single 64k byte kernel address
>space offered by the smaller 11s, at least when used for timesharing.

V7 only just barely ran on the small 11s, in fact.  It made a workable
single-user system if you didn't get ambitious, but the kernel table
sizes had to be so small that it wasn't hard to get into trouble.

V6, on the other hand, ran fairly well on a 34-class machine with 64KB
of physical memory.  You needed to add a bit more core to get the biggest
programs to run, but you could edit, compile, etc. in 64K.  Multiple users
wouldn't be entirely happy about the performance, but they could get work
done.  I used such a system for a while (briefly at 64KB, extensively at
80KB).
-- 
As a user I'll take speed over|     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
features any day. -A.Tanenbaum| uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu