Comment by userbinator

Comment by userbinator 8 days ago

8 replies

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wrongfully assuming 128MB for the whole OS was enough

If I were you I'd investigate why it needs so much. Keep in mind how much functionality older OSs had, and how much computing power they needed. Always good to see more OS projects nonetheless, but always remember that efficiency is important.

qingcharles 8 days ago

I had to just go find the details for the original 386 Unix server [1] I was running ~1995 because I thought it was running just fine on 8MB RAM, running an EFnet IRC node, FTP, MUDs and some early web apps. And... yep, 2 x 4MB SIMMs. Wild times. A single photo from my phone is three times that size.

(I later took that PC home and used it as the test machine for my own hobby OS, which had to run from a 1.44MB floppy because there was no other sane way to transfer the dev images from my desktop)

[1] One of these: https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/userdata/images/large/75...

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  • dvirbt 8 days ago

    Wow 8MB of ram… that’s really amazing! Which hobbyOS did you made?

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    • qingcharles 7 days ago

      I named it Tinkerbell for some reason. It was kinda neat, it would boot directly into a windowed GUI. It lived at tinkerbell.org back in the 90s, but it seems it got missed by archive.org :(

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dvirbt 8 days ago

Hey, it was enough for most basic stuff, but only running Doom or more advanced things would need above that.

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ethin 8 days ago

Eh, I tend to do the same (significantly over-estimate RAM requirements) since it's hard to know just how much RAM you'll need to begin with. Though usually for something like the stack I start with 256-512K.

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