Comment by simgoh
Out of curiosity, back when you were compiling the kernel yourself was it because you wanted to learn it or because you wanted to add more modules to the kernel that didnt exist there by default?
Out of curiosity, back when you were compiling the kernel yourself was it because you wanted to learn it or because you wanted to add more modules to the kernel that didnt exist there by default?
Memory and storage were far more expensive and limited in 1996 than they are today.
Go a few years earlier and you find that Microsoft introduced a boot-time menuconfig system mostly to enable people to select which *drivers* to load because, if you weren't careful, you could wind up leaving too little memory for the game you were trying to run.
The kernel compilation had a configuration UI where you could select all the drivers you wanted to literally build in. So I selected just what I needed, to save memory, recompiled, waited an hour et voila. Kernel modules came later.