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From: tim@maths.tcd.ie (Timothy Murphy)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: Do TeX and Metafont exist under MINIX?
Message-ID: <1990Nov4.231958.20197@maths.tcd.ie>
Date: 4 Nov 90 23:19:58 GMT
References: <1990Nov3.204223.28577@ioe.lon.ac.uk> <1990Nov4.014404.10422@iwarp.intel.com>
Organization: Dept. of Maths, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland.
Lines: 26

In <1990Nov4.014404.10422@iwarp.intel.com> pcm@iwarp.intel.com (Phil Miller) writes:

>The MS-DOS versions of TeX and LaTeX each require about 510k of memory to
>run.  MINIX doesn't have a compiler which can handle that memory
>model, and you would in any event NOT be able to spare the memory from
>other processes to run *tex.

While I agree that it would be difficult to implement TeX under MINIX,
I don't believe it would be impossible.
An implemetation of TeX on a pdp-11 --
where the problems would have been much the same --
was described in an early TUGboat.
My recollection is that TeX was divided into 2 processes.

TEX.EXE can be under 150k (sbTeX).
Admittedly large arrays (particularly the 'mem' array)
bring the run-time size to 500k or more.
But it might be possible to store these on a RAM disk,
or on memory (/dev/???) reserved for this purpose,
if that is allowed in MINIX.

-- 

Timothy Murphy  

e-mail: tim@maths.tcd.ie