Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!geneva.rutgers.edu!hedrick From: hedrick@geneva.rutgers.edu (Charles Hedrick) Newsgroups: comp.os.minix Subject: Re: Bruce Evans' opus Message-ID: Date: 30 May 89 00:46:59 GMT References: <2570@ast.cs.vu.nl> <216@bilver.UUCP> Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J. Lines: 38 This is really a plea directed at ast. Can we please make some kind of compromise here? I'm in a situation that I think is shared by many of the readers here. I'm a hacker. I'd like an OS for my home machine that I have source to. I'd also like an OS that I can recommend for students to put on their PC's. At the moment Minix is really the only alternative. Gnu OS is the major alternative, but it doesn't exist yet. Even when it does, chances are most of the people on this list won't be able to afford machines that run it, since the Gnu project in general seems to like large software that requires large machines. Minix does very well in using limited resources. Just what the home hacker community needs. But it's possible to have too much of a good thing. 64K programs carry "small is beautiful" too far. I've collected a lot of software for my PC (which I currently use under Microport System V). Almost none of this will run in 64K. There's a middle ground between Gnu Emacs and ed. That middle ground is occupied by a large amount of stuff that is posted to the net by hackers for PC's, e.g. various microemacses, KA9Q TCP/IP, sc, kermit. This is all reasonably small-scale stuff. It mostly runs fine under MS-DOS. But almost none of it will run under Minix. I had to remove all the help strings from kermit to bring it up under Minix, which is an abomination. The question is what Minix is supposed to be. OK, originally it was intended as an example for OS courses. I'm sure it still is fine for that. But I'm much more concerned with producing students who know how to use OS's than how to write them. And currently they can't really use Minix. So they end up running MS/DOS, and learning nothing at all about how an OS should really support their programming. Can't we do something to lift the curse of 64K from Minix sooner than 4 years from now? Yes, I agree that the 286 is an abortion. The large model is an obscenity. But I'd much rather see my students using a slightly scatalogical Minix than MS/DOS. Bruce's 286 patches are a useful starting point. But what we need most is a large-model compiler, and the ability to run large-model programs even on the 8088. I might even be willing to work on it if I saw some signs that you'd accept the results.