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From: hasty@netcom.com (Amancio Hasty Jr)
Subject: Re: Why would I want LINUX?
Message-ID: <hastyCC826F.MHH@netcom.com>
Organization: Netcom Online Communications Services (408-241-9760 login: guest)
References: <250m5t$dmk@europa.eng.gtefsd.com> <252n71$2d4@fnnews.fnal.gov> <25aq81$abf@umd5.umd.edu>
Date: Mon, 23 Aug 1993 17:06:14 GMT
Lines: 36

In article <25aq81$abf@umd5.umd.edu> mark@roissy.umd.edu (Mark Sienkiewicz) writes:
>In article <252n71$2d4@fnnews.fnal.gov> dejan@cdfsga.fnal.gov (Dejan Vucinic) writes:
>>
>>     All this probably holds for Linux as well. It seems that DOS engineers 
>>used some other mathematics in their time calculations. ;>
>>
>>     Don't trust figures too much. Try and measure. You'll be surprized.
>
>When you look at DOS machines, you have to pay close attention to just what
>the benchmarks measure.  Often, you will find the Unix-ish system had to 
>support 32 bit integers and a megabyte of memory, while the DOS system got
>to get away with 16 bit integers and 64k.
>

How long did it take Microsoft to address the functionality provided
by Unix-like system? And, better yet can it compare in terms of 
of resource utilization to Unix like systems?

Look now days you can buy a 486 with 64k cache. I don't think
that *BSD systems are attempting to be ultra minimalistic systems.
And, I don't think that anyone is going to bring out and dust off
the earlier versions of Unix which ran in 64k of memory in a PDP-11.

To take it to another extreme, last nite playing around with postgres,
an object-oriented databse, I was amazed at the size for just the
postgres binary, 11MB. Of course, the postgres installation included
other binaries. I wonder how a dos like system would handle such
a program. Oh, I know that it can be done. 

Amancio 

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