Believe Josh Levine's The Island ECN (one of the first trading networks) ran on DOS. He released the source code years ago:
640k Really Is Enough for Anyone
21–30 of 100 posts
Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone
#22"It’s largely attributed to him, though, so he might as well have said it."
This is such a reckless statement, IMO. Sort of like the opposite of "If a tree falls..."
Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone
#23I recently saw a video of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates at d5, and Gates talked about how you could run Word on the original Mac in a 14K OS. Jobs interjected that MacOS was more like 22K, but the point was made.
Can you imagine an entire OS in 20-something being built today? BIOSes are larger than that.
Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone
#24"It’s largely attributed to him, though, so he might as well have said it." This is such a reckless statement, IMO. Sort of like the opposite of "If a tree falls..."
It's like politics. If you tell a lie often enough it becomes the truth.
Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone
#25As 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'…
I don't understand modern swap. Ok you can page out a few MB you don't use on a regular basis, but any swapping kills the machine.
I'd far rather OOMkiller killed off non active tabs (there's almost always a web browser using the memory on a desktop), or run away apache processses, than try to swap. For that reason I never configure swap on any of my machines.
Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone
#26I recently saw a video of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates at d5, and Gates talked about how you could run Word on the original Mac in a 14K OS. Jobs interjected that MacOS was more like 22K, but the point was made. Can you imagine an entire OS in 20-something being built today? BIOSes are larger than that.
My network send/receive windows and buffers are a thousand times larger than that!
Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone
#27Bill 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.
Guess: it was perpetuated because lots of tech people hated him and what he did to the industry and to computing progress in general.
He has since gotten way, way better PR handling though. Just look at the way Reddit absolutely adores him nowadays (he's done lots of very carefully managed AMAs). Heck, even on HN there's enough young people who have no idea how much this one individual repressed computing progress over 1-2 decades through market abuse.
Here's one example of many of how the pro billg PR is done:
https://www.reddit.com/r/secretsanta/comments/5iphpa/i_won_s...
Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Guess: it was perpetuated because lots of tech people hated him and what he did to the industry and to computing progress in general. He has since gotten way, way better PR handling though. Just look at the way Reddit absolutely adores him nowadays (he's done lots of very carefully managed AMAs). Heck, even on HN there's enough young people who have no idea how much this one individual repressed computing progress ov…
[deleted]
Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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'…
I don't understand modern swap. Ok you can page out a few MB you don't use on a regular basis, but any swapping kills the machine. I'd far rather OOMkiller killed off non active tabs (there's almost always a web browser using the memory on a desktop), or run away apache processses, than try to swap. For that reason I never configure swap on any of my machines.
The regular old swap is slightly technologically behind today's needs. It is supposed to be replaced by things like zram and zswap, that don't kill the machine.
Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone
#30As 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?
In some cases there may be replacements, but they would require newer hardware as well (think expensive lab equipment, not just workstations), which brings the cost much higher than simply replacing the software. My father's environmental testing lab is currently in this predicament, but they finally got rid of their last Windows 3.11 (and older) machines a couple of years ago so it's not like they aren't trying, it just needs to happen incrementally.