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640k Really Is Enough for Anyone

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Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone

#91

Post by PurpleRamen »

hota_mazi wrote: post #40
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.

> Why does this myth keep getting pushed Same reason plenty of people still believe in the Loch Ness Monster or that Crop Circles were made by aliens. Some people are hopelessly refractory to critical thinking and will never change their mind, no matter the evidence presented to them.

I don't think anyone is seriously believing in the loch ness monster. Crop circles properly too. Are they still happening?

Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone

#92

Post by qubex »

johansch wrote: post #62
qubex wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m a child of the eighties, I grew up in the nineties, I remember waiting in line for my boxed copy of Windows 95 one August night in 1995, I remember ruling at Microsoft’s antitrust case (as related in WIRED), I remember how Slashdot featured an icon of Bill Gates with Borg add-one, but... I absolutely love the guy now and wish he would run for President (I am not American, just terrified).

Do you at all remember any market abuse, or do you only remember the good stuff? (Is this an attack? I can't tell any longer.)

No it’s not an attack. I’m just stating why in good faith I disagree with your statement.

Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone

#93

Post by qubex »

johansch wrote: post #84
qubex wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m not really sure what you are referring to because I have not edited any of my comments, but this one probably closely resembles another one I made further up and therefore might give you the impression that there had been some ’morphing’ involved.

Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone

#94

Post by stevekemp »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #33
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…

Not to throw in anecdote after anecdote, especially since it is slightly off topic, but I have to share. I worked at a textile company 17 years ago and the bought brand new "state of the art" embroidery machines from Germany and they ran Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. At the time I was just "the web and IT guy" so it was my job to set up a token ring network with coaxial cables to network these machines together so the…

Damn I remember doing that same thing around 1994-1996, using coaxial cables and checking all the connections / terminators.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE2

Even back then when we wanted to add a new host to the network we had to hunt in the "junk bin" in the local store to get a networking card, then pray that it was supported under Linux.

I can say that I've never used token-ring though.

Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone

#95

Post by katastic »

orionblastar wrote: post #76
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'…

The Commodore 64 Kernal is in a ROM so it is a fast boot for the OS, but the 1541 floppy drive is slow unless you use Fastload or Jiffydos, etc. I think some C64 units had a spare socket for GEOS the GUI made for the C64.

While I agree, it should be noted ROM is actually incredibly slow by today's standards.

Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone

#96

Post by krylon »

katastic wrote: post #11
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'…

My work laptop - admittedly not a high-end machine - takes about two minutes from power-on to login-prompt. I've seen Windows machines - without SSDs - that had tons and tons and tons of software installed on them, that took 10 to 15 minutes from power-on to login.

Compared to that, The C64 boots off ROM, IIRC? So that is kind of cheating. ;-) But yes, I had a C64, too, the delay between switching it on and the machine being usable was too low to notice.

Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone

#97

Post by wott »

mhd wrote: post #89
tigershark wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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..

You could make menus items in the config.sys to chose between different options, you did not need several boot disks. I don't remember in which MS DOS version it was introduced (perhaps 5.0?), but that was the normal way to go after that.

Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone

#98

Post by tigershark »

wott wrote: post #97
mhd wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.. You could make menus items in the config.sys to chose between different options, you did not need several boot disks. I don't remember in which MS DOS version it was introduced (perhaps 5.0?), but that was the normal…

DOS 6. In dos 5 you could only selectively load stuff in the autoexec.bat, not in the config.sys

Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone

#99

Post by digi_owl »

wott wrote: post #66
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…

One problem in these days is drivers. There was a glorious period of the DOS days, when: * all sound cards had a mode compatible with SoundBlaster or at least AdLib cards; * all Ethernet cards had a mode compatible with NE2000 cards; * all video cards had EGA/VGA/VESA compatibles modes. So that defined an informal standard for PC/DOS. Your programs just needed to support these and you could get a working system (even…

Anyone know how FreeDOS deal with this, if at all?

Re: 640k Really Is Enough for Anyone

#100

Post by torstenvl »

ben_w wrote: post #50
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.)

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

Dishonest comparison is dishonest. I'm pretty confident it's actually possible to uninstall Safari, and that macOS will continue to work.

Besides, the integration with the operating system isn't the problem. It's the integration with the only operating system. It isn't monopoly abuse if you don't have a monopoly.

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