640k Really Is Enough for Anyone
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640k Really Is Enough for Anyone
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Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone
#2Great article about using FreeDOS. However, the title is misleading because the article is not really addressing that specific claim.
Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone
#3Amusingly, loading that page takes up 897kB.
Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone
#4Great article about using FreeDOS. However, the title is misleading because the article is not really addressing that specific claim.
Sure - but I think the title is referencing the fact that 640K is the minimum required for a basic DOS system to run. Using that system you can write code for fun that would by definition fit in 640K.
Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone
#5DOS is only "real time" if you don't do disk I/O. Disk I/O is synchronous.
There's something to be said for using FreeDOS simply as a loader for a real-time control program. It's not doing anything in the background. There's no networking stack. There's no way to attack it without physical access.
Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone
#6Great article about using FreeDOS. However, the title is misleading because the article is not really addressing that specific claim.
Sure - but I think the title is referencing the fact that 640K is the minimum required for a basic DOS system to run. Using that system you can write code for fun that would by definition fit in 640K.
I'd rather pay for more hardware than use segmented memory again
Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone
#7As for the alleged Bill Gates quote, I read somewhere (Deep C Secrets by Peer van der Linden, I think, but I am too lazy to look it up), that "640k ought to be enough for anyone" did not mean that it was enough for anyone for all times. I am not a fan of Bill Gates, but he is not stupid. And at the time he - allegedly - said it, 640k of RAM was (for a single user!) was indeed a lot! Compare that to the 64k of the C64. It is idiotic to think that he meant that 640k would be sufficient 30 years in the future.
That being said, I actually did install MS-DOS 6.22 on three computers over the last couple of years, because the company I work at does - among other things - industrial automation, and (at least) one of our customers has a plant built with automation technology that can apparently only be programmed and configured with a program running on DOS. And it must do some rather funky things, because the software will reliably fail to talk to the PLC if it is running in a virtual machine or on FreeDOS. And of course the company that has written this software has gone out of business a long time ago, so there won't be any updates, either. ;-) If I didn't have more important things to do, figuring out why it does not work on FreeDOS could have been a lot of fun, but just installing MS DOS was the faster solution.
Still, installing DOS these days is an interesting experience. The whole system comes on three floppy disks, the installation procedure takes about 15 minutes, and the freshly installed system boots up in about 30 seconds, including the BIOS doing its thing. Admittedly, you cannot do very much with it without additional software.
Three floppy disks - that is about 4.5 Megabyte, Ladies and Gentlemen. Today's high end CPUs have as much L2 cache, or more.
And primitive as it is, there are situations where DOS is a reasonable choice.
I'm still glad, though, that I never had to deal with segmented memory. That sounds horrible.
Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone
#8Great article about using FreeDOS. However, the title is misleading because the article is not really addressing that specific claim.
Sure - but I think the title is referencing the fact that 640K is the minimum required for a basic DOS system to run. Using that system you can write code for fun that would by definition fit in 640K.
640k is the maximum available to applications on the original IBM PC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conventional_memory#640_KB_bar...
Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone
#9If you are looking for a truly minimalist OS for your PC, DOS is for you. I have a warm feeling when I try to imagine an HPC compute node running DOS instead of a fat OS with all the overhead that comes with it. I know, it sounds like a pipe dream, but wouldn't it be nice if there was something like DOS that is natively 64-bit and also supports multiprocessing and multithreading - basically, something that turns a machine into a modern high-performance "calculator", without any unnecessary overhead? I wonder how close one could get to such "ideal" by using Linux or a BSD.
Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone
#10I love the idea that there's still an active community developing for old hardware. Specially on videogames since many times they apply modern design ideas in very old hardware.
As a dumb example I saw a platformer for the ZX spectrum not long ago, where the falling speed was not linear but accelerated, which may seem trivial now but back then was something really unusual and I didn't realized how big was the difference after watching it. Then you have stuff way more complex such as the RTS for the Commodore mentioned by the author.
About the quote. Bill Gates said once in an interview:
> I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time.