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640k Really Is Enough for Anyone

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Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone

#41

Post by hota_mazi »

johansch wrote: post #27
nsxwolf wrote: post #19

Earlier 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…

> (he's done lots of very carefully managed AMAs)

You seem to have a pretty prominent chip on your shoulder regarding Bill Gates.

Gates has donated billions of dollars of his fortune to charity and he's largely credited for having eradicated malaria through these efforts in multiple countries.

It's hard to find a good reason to dislike someone like that.

Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone

#42

Post by boznz »

Animats wrote: post #5

DOS 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.

True, DOS and BIOS interrupt calls stopped your program until complete, this lag was however fairly consistent and in the order of a few milliseconds on newer machines so could be used in higher latency real time control. "Proper" DOS real-time control generally used assisting hardware to buffer/offload processing or did not use the INT calls using interrupt driven system to make it real real-time, all DOS programs could be "Bare-Metal" if you did not use any DOS/BIOS INT calls which were generally written in assembly and not interrupt friendly.

Also having no network stack or USB stack is pretty limiting these days. I'm sure FreeDOS can implement these, there are definitely DOS drivers out there for older network cards to get TCP/IP up and running and there was always serial modems which we used extensively in "the old days" (pause while audience cringes!)

Being cut-off from the outside world is of course security bliss but the PC still needed to be physically secure as there were no passwords/encryption and remote maintenance is not an option.

Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone

#43

Post by boznz »

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?

The bagging control system at my customers seafood factory still uses DOS, it controls the hardware through 2 serial ports, the hardware has been updated several times since the 80's, There are no drivers or security, just base DOS formatted hard disk and autoexec.bat with a single exe program being called, I just clone the hard disk for them when its time for an update and keep the old PC around for backup.

I've thought of reverse engineering the software but to tell the truth the program and the machine it controls were just built very well and so long as we have spare hardware it could go forever.

Due to driver problems I'm not sure you could even build a system these days that would be guaranteed future proofed for 30+ years.

Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone

#44

Post by johansch »

hota_mazi wrote: post #41
johansch wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> (he's done lots of very carefully managed AMAs) You seem to have a pretty prominent chip on your shoulder regarding Bill Gates. Gates has donated billions of dollars of his fortune to charity and he's largely credited for having eradicated malaria through these efforts in multiple countries. It's hard to find a good reason to dislike someone like that.

How old are you? Let me just guess; not old enough to have experienced living/working in tech while Bill was doing his thing.

Did you ever pause to consider how much humanity would have progressed without him stopping so much progress in the first place?

(I deleted a section on the malaria stuff; I misread your comment slightly at first.)

Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone

#45

Post by pjc50 »

reaperducer wrote: post #23

I 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.

The 4k demoscene people could do a lot with that, but there's few places that really need it. IOT devices, perhaps.

Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone

#47

Post by lamp_book »

johansch wrote: post #44
hota_mazi wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (he's done lots of very carefully managed AMAs) You seem to have a pretty prominent chip on your shoulder regarding Bill Gates. Gates has donated billions of dollars of his fortune to charity and he's largely credited for having eradicated malaria through these efforts in multiple countries. It's hard to find a good reason to dislike someone like that.

How old are you? Let me just guess; not old enough to have experienced living/working in tech while Bill was doing his thing. Did you ever pause to consider how much humanity would have progressed without him stopping so much progress in the first place? (I deleted a section on the malaria stuff; I misread your comment slightly at first.)

If not Bill then Bob. At least he's doing some good in the world with that cash instead of hoarding it for him and his family. If it weren't for him, how long would have malaria persisted?

Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone

#48

Post by johansch »

lamp_book wrote: post #47
johansch wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How old are you? Let me just guess; not old enough to have experienced living/working in tech while Bill was doing his thing. Did you ever pause to consider how much humanity would have progressed without him stopping so much progress in the first place? (I deleted a section on the malaria stuff; I misread your comment slightly at first.)

If not Bill then Bob. At least he's doing some good in the world with that cash instead of hoarding it for him and his family. If it weren't for him, how long would have malaria persisted?

I think his primary motivation is so simple.. he wants people to like him.

Many, many people disliked him after his predatory business days. This is the perfect way to a) keep doing interesting work, b) getting people to like him again, c) get some personal karma.

I can quite easily see the appeal of this.

Also; I'm a big fan of his current work. I loved how my country (Sweden) matched a very large billg foundation program funding the other year; I think he's way better equipped with handling that money than my government's idealistic but fumbling people.

I just think we shouldn't forget his past just because he's turned into modern day santa. We should learn from history...

Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone

#49

Post by greenleafjacob »

isostatic wrote: post #25
katastic wrote: post #11

Earlier 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.

Swap can be useful for batch jobs that need lots of memory to run but the working set is small. Then you can keep the physical memory for the working set and the disk swap for the (larger) whole set of memory.

Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone

#50

Post by ben_w »

johansch wrote: post #44
hota_mazi wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (he's done lots of very carefully managed AMAs) You seem to have a pretty prominent chip on your shoulder regarding Bill Gates. Gates has donated billions of dollars of his fortune to charity and he's largely credited for having eradicated malaria through these efforts in multiple countries. It's hard to find a good reason to dislike someone like that.

How old are you? Let me just guess; not old enough to have experienced living/working in tech while Bill was doing his thing. Did you ever pause to consider how much humanity would have progressed without him stopping so much progress in the first place? (I deleted a section on the malaria stuff; I misread your comment slightly at first.)

The main thing I remember from the era of Gates Is Literally Satan was the browser wars, and how awful it was that Internet Explorer was both free and tightly integrated into the operating system.

#cough# Safari on Apple devices

#cough# Chrome on Android and ChromeOS devices

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