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640k Really Is Enough for Anyone

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Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone

#81

Post by orionblastar »

nsxwolf wrote: post #19
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.

It is an urban legend. I used QEMM for my Dos to get access to the rest of the PC memory by loading things in high or extended memory it freed up more memory on the bottom 640K conventional memory.

Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone

#82

Post by orionblastar »

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.

I think most people are angry he put a lot of businesses out of business by bundling IE with Windows to put Netscape and other companies out of business that did web browsers.

Microsoft made their own version of Java that almost killed Sun. I think it was J++ and later J# and then Microsoft made C# to replace it.

The original DOS was CP/M that Seattle Software and Microsoft made their DOS do CP/M API calls and a program to convert CP/M programs to DOS. At the time this was not illegal, ECT. Microsoft did Basic, Fortran, Cobol without getting a license for them for 8 bit Pcs.

Those are just a few examples, mostly unethical but not criminal in 1970s and 1980s. By 1999 the DOJ investigated Microsoft.

https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-v-microsoft-courts-findings-f...

Also Apple fans claim Microsoft ripped off the Macintosh with Windows and tried to put Apple out of business.

To people like Gates there are good and bad things, and people only know the good things and ignore the bad things because Microsoft built their own industry, ect.

Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone

#83

Post by barrkel »

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.

It doesn't make sense on a server, but on a desktop, unless it's actively thrashing, swapping is normally fine. It's not cool to kill off the user's possibly unsaved work with a few random process terminations.

There are other, more cooperative ways of doing it. For example, always save enough state to restore after a kill when becoming a background task. But it's also more work.

Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone

#84

Post by johansch »

qubex wrote: post #53
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.)

I never liked Bill Gates when I was a power user in the nineties and early 2000s but it really is amazing that one could offset his contribution to disease eradication and his philanthropy generally with some aggravation about his business’ tactics and nebulous what-ifs about what might have happened if he had not been on the scene or had behaved differently. (Moore’s Law would did it’s thing anyway, whether he was t…

Just noting that this comment first only talked about the browser bundling antitrust thing, and then, after I commented, completely morphed into something else.

Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone

#85

Post by johansch »

webreac wrote: post #75
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.)

Hello, I have also lost karma points on this subject. I also feel that Microsoft had a very negative effect on the progress of computer science during many years but it is very difficult to convince other generations. There were many positive and negative effects. To grasp the global effect, you need to have lived all the progress of the previous years before Microsoft and you need to have followed all the commercial…

Two hours later. Wow, you weren't wrong about the down-voting.

The lack of a sense of history here is disturbing. I thought HN was better than this.

Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone

#86

Post by gkya »

sauravc wrote: post #12

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

Whether he said it or not is irrelevant, the article is about something else (or, something tangentially related).

Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone

#88

Post by grzm »

gkya wrote: post #87

I'm really surprised that this article is flagged. Yes the title is clickbaity, but the topic itself is interesting and has created some interesting, relevant discussion.

When you come across a post you believe is flagged in error, you can contact the mods via the Contact link to have them look into it. On occasion, they remove flags.

Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone

#89

Post by mhd »

tigershark wrote: post #57
AzzieElbab wrote: post #32

Anyone remember Wing Commander game that required exactly 640K of conventional RAM?

I Never played wing commander but I don't think it is possible. With dos 6.22 using DOS=HIGH,UMB and loading everything possible in high memory and removing all the non essential stuff gave you 622k free memory if I remember correctly. I managed to get more only "cheating" using a boot disk from the dos version bundled with windows 95, but even in that case you couldn't get more than 635k of free conventional memory.

That's certainly one thing I don't miss about old DOS gaming, having specific boot disks around with the proper config.sys/autoexec.bat magic to make ornery games work -- base RAM, HMA, EMS, XMS etc.. I had to play some game without the mouse, as that cost precious kilobytes…

But yeah, even when you moved drivers to the higher memory areas, there had to be the actual memory manager loaded to do that, so the full 640k wasn't really possible. And despite Origin games like Wing Commander and Ultima basically needing the next generation of PCs not released yet, they didn't really demand the impossible.

Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone

#90

Post by dTal »

qubex wrote: post #53
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.)

I never liked Bill Gates when I was a power user in the nineties and early 2000s but it really is amazing that one could offset his contribution to disease eradication and his philanthropy generally with some aggravation about his business’ tactics and nebulous what-ifs about what might have happened if he had not been on the scene or had behaved differently. (Moore’s Law would did it’s thing anyway, whether he was t…

>Microsoft’s stranglehold on the desktop market relented anyway

Hardly. Market share is still roughly 85% Windows, 15% Mac, and fuck-all % Linux, which is reflected in the level of support provided for applications, games, hardware etc. Even disregarding compatibility, MacOS is not a straightforward alternative as it only runs on Apple hardware, which is very expensive and only offers a narrow range of opinionated designs.

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