Similar problem here, I work at a company where UNIX is treated
as the proverbial "red headed stepchild" (no offense intended).

We produce communication products for MS-windows and I provide
test environments for testing via UNIX.  I use NetBSD for real
work and I must say that is embarrassing to have to admit that
this awesome OS can't support more than 16Megs because of a SCSI card!

Let's face it, in this day and time, a workstation running X on
16 Megs is poorly suited to do much more.  We have had a bad
quarter and stocks have been hell, much the same as everyone else,
and I doubt I'll be able to get a new $160 SCSI card for a
UNIX machine.

I have 32 Megs in my NetBSD machine and find it very frustrating
that I have to hack machdep.c to limit NetBSD's access to the 1st
16 Megs.  What more, I am fortunate that I know C and the NetBSD
code well enough to make it work, buy limiting it, where there
are lots of users that couldn't hack a hello world program.

I have been rather desperate and have been trying to get one of
unofficial bounce buffer patches for 1.1 to work for me, unfortunately
as luck would have it, the 1542CF and my configuration don't work
together.  So I am doomed to wait yet another release, in hopes of
an official bounce buffer.

A few classic saying come to mind...

Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it.
A good OS is useless if it's not usable.

nuff said.

 ----------
From:  owner-current-users
Sent:  Tuesday, September 17, 1996 10:13 AM
To:  John Nemeth
Cc:  Michael L. VanLoon -- HeadCandy.com; Chris G Demetriou; Jukka Marin;   
greywolf; current-users
Subject:  Re: tangent: bounce buffers.

>      Aren't you neglecting a little detail?  Namely, that the 386SX
> only has 24 address lines and therefore is only capable of physically
> addressing 16 MB of memory.  You might want to change the above to a
> 386DX.  Then you might want to ask how this poor college student can
> afford to buy more then 16 MB of RAM (note that 30 pin SIMM, which is
> what a 386 will most likely use, assuming it doesn't use DIP or SIPP,
> costs more then 72 pin SIMM).  You might ask how this college student
> can afford SCSI hard drives, which are more expensive then IDE drives.
> Needless to say, if you can afford the RAM and SCSI HD's, you can
> probably afford a new motherboard and/or SCSI controller.  I don't see
> it as that big of a problem.

        In which case why support something like the sun3 at all?
        Probably because there are enough out there and people _want_
        to use them. Similarly there are a lot of aha154X cards out
        there - we have one in a 486dx2/66 which sits on the desk of
        one of our web designers. He used to have win95, but now he's
        much happier running NetBSD. I have an extra 16mb simm sitting
        in front of me now, but I can't justify the 120 pounds needed to
        add a VESA scsi card - if I did get approval for money on the
        machine I'm more liable to buy XInside & add an extra svga card
        & monitor we have lying around, then there's that copy of
        stronghold we need...

                   David/abs             (david@mono.org)

.---- I've been too drunk to love ----.--- I've been too drunk to   
remember -.
|          Too drunk to care          |     The hell of the night before   
   |
|  Looked like death, felt like Hell  |    I've been drinking myself   
blind  |
`------ Been the worse for wear ------'--- And still I'll drink some more   
 --'