der Mouse said:

>Well...FSVO "work".  I wouldn't want to try to do anything significant
>in 4M.  (And yes, port-sun3 is really the correct place to ask.  Note
>Cc: and Reply-To:.)

With 4M, SunOS 4.0.1, and Sunview it will stagger along. In a dim, distant
past, that was my work desktop.

>My guess is, probably not, unless you have the third-party RAM upgrade.
>If you really do have only 4M, go with the oldest OS you can possibly
>stand to run - the newer it is, the bigger it is, in general; stripping
>everything unnecessary out helps, but the newer OSes are still usually
>bigger than the older ones.

Even with 12M, X will be slow and swapping somewhat.

The NetBSD GENERIC kernel is now too big for 3/50. The kernel to install
and use is the INSTALL kernel.

>I saw one once that had an upgrade installed.  It wasn't done by
>removing the RAM; the RAM was soldered in place.  It was done by
>pulling two of the large chips - memory controller, I think, and one
>other.  (MMU maybe?)  The daughterboard plugged into those two sockets
>and had two sockets for the chips to get moved into, plus some SIMM
>sockets and I think a little additional logic.

All 9 of my 3/50 boxen either have 8 or 12 megs of memory. They are all
Clearpoint daughterboards with 1 meg simms. 

>Of course, there may be multiple variants of the -3/50 memory upgrade
>kit; I've seen only the one example.

Yes, there were 2 or 3 vendors.

A Sun 3/50 with 8 or 12 megs could probably be used as a mail/dns server,
but I wouldn't want to try to run a GUI at the same time. Running NetBSD 1.3.3
would probably be a good bet as it is reasonably small and is Y2K compliant.



-- 
Rick Kelly  rmk@rmkhome.com  www.rmkhome.com