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640k Really Is Enough for Anyone

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Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone

#11

Post by katastic »

krylon wrote: post #7

As 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…

> the freshly installed system boots up in about 30 seconds, including the BIOS doing its thing.

Honest question/clarification, is that... considered fast?

My DOS system used to boot that fast. A C64 is almost instant. And my old ~2013 Chromebook boots in ~7 seconds into Linux with an eMMC drive (slower than an SSD but still fairly fast). It's only got 2 GB of RAM so when it hits swap it'll bog to a standstill so it's often faster just to hit the reset key than try and recover.

Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone

#13

Post by ikeboy »

krylon wrote: post #7

As 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…

What I don't get is, if this multi-decade-old software is valuable enough to be used today, why isn't it valuable enough for someone to have written a replacement in the intervening decades?

Surely every plant like this would pay something for the ability to run on modern OSes, and presumably there are enough plants using this kind of software to recoup the cost of development?

Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone

#14

Post by jdblair »

ikeboy wrote: post #13
krylon wrote: post #7

As 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…

What I don't get is, if this multi-decade-old software is valuable enough to be used today, why isn't it valuable enough for someone to have written a replacement in the intervening decades? Surely every plant like this would pay something for the ability to run on modern OSes, and presumably there are enough plants using this kind of software to recoup the cost of development?

People who run industrial processes tend to make careful, conservative choices. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" is the golden rule, since any downtime can cost serious money. This means staying on old, proven systems is favored over upgrading for the sake of upgrading, even if there are possible improvements.

Context: I used to work on solar power management and control, and developed manufacturing processes to build our hardware.

Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone

#15

Post by mintplant »

ikeboy wrote: post #13
krylon wrote: post #7

As 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…

What I don't get is, if this multi-decade-old software is valuable enough to be used today, why isn't it valuable enough for someone to have written a replacement in the intervening decades? Surely every plant like this would pay something for the ability to run on modern OSes, and presumably there are enough plants using this kind of software to recoup the cost of development?

I wouldn't count on that. Battle-testedness can be a feature, and a new software package means new training for those tasked with maintaining the system. The old one is a known quantity.

Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone

#16

Post by hsitz »

lnx01 wrote: post #4
em3rgent0rdr wrote: post #2

Great 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.

Probably not this. 640k was actually the maximum amount of memory available for a user's DOS applications on an IBM PC or clone. There were many PC's sold that had only 64k of use-accessible RAM. It was only in later years, as memory got cheaper (and apps "ballooned") that machines maxed out at the 640k limit. With the 16-bit system the actual CPU-addressable limit was 1024kb (or 1MB), but the difference was reserved for use by the system for things like the ROM BIOS, graphic adapter bios, etc.

My memory is vague on this, but I believe the core DOS commands (e.g., copy) were part of the ROM BIOS (or maybe they were just always loaded into non-user-accessible RAM as part of boot). So they were always present and did not affect available user RAM. The non-core DOS commands (e.g., xcopy) had to be loaded into user RAM to run. What's more, if you had a diskette-based system (i.e., no hard drive), you would have to load the floppy diskette that had the particular extended DOS command you wanted to run, before you could run it (because it had to be read off the diskette).

Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone

#17

Post by icegreentea2 »

ikeboy wrote: post #13
krylon wrote: post #7

As 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…

What I don't get is, if this multi-decade-old software is valuable enough to be used today, why isn't it valuable enough for someone to have written a replacement in the intervening decades? Surely every plant like this would pay something for the ability to run on modern OSes, and presumably there are enough plants using this kind of software to recoup the cost of development?

Well, there's two parts to your question, if there is a demand, why isn't there a supply, and is there really a demand?

For the first part, if the original company has gone out of business, and enough records and knowledge lost and scattered, then it'd actually potentially be very difficult for a new group to identify what the original customers were, much less identify what the potential size of market is today. That's quite a lot of risk to take on (in my mind anyways). Industrial automation is one of those things that people don't openly disclose in a way that makes it easy to canvas the market cheaply.

Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone

#18

Post by rahimnathwani »

ikeboy wrote: post #13
krylon wrote: post #7

As 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…

What I don't get is, if this multi-decade-old software is valuable enough to be used today, why isn't it valuable enough for someone to have written a replacement in the intervening decades? Surely every plant like this would pay something for the ability to run on modern OSes, and presumably there are enough plants using this kind of software to recoup the cost of development?

This isn't software that you can just install and use. This type of software is tightly integrated with the hardware in the factory or distribution center. So, even if there were free software which did the same thing, it would cost a lot of time and money to replace the old, already-working system.

Moreover, for software that was put in place 20 years ago, it's likely that some of the functionality is unknown, i.e. the whole system works together, but exactly what is being done by each piece of software isn't fully understood by anyone still at the company. So it would require a bunch of work to even spec a replacement.

So it's totally rational to keep the existing, working system, even if you need a dedicated PC to administer it.

(Source: I was in a similar situation ~20 years ago.)

Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone

#19

Post by nsxwolf »

sauravc wrote: post #12

Bill Gates never said "640k ought to be enough for anybody." https://www.computerworld.com/article/2534312/operating-syst...

Why does this myth keep getting pushed - by tech people no less? Bill Gates emphatically denied ever saying it and no one has ever come forward with a scrap of evidence he actually said it.

Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone

#20

Post by i80and »

Koshkin wrote: post #9

If 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 ma…

You might be interested in BareMetal[1]!

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BareMetal

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