Subject: Re: NetBSD with 4mb ram
To: None <kpneal@pobox.com>
From: Rick Kelly <rmk@toad.rmkhome.com>
List: port-i386
Date: 05/25/2002 18:43:37
kpneal@pobox.com said:

>With 8 or 12 megs of memory? Luxury. I didn't think those boxes
>sold with anything but the 4 megs on the motherboard, so you must
>have an added memory card thingie.

At least 2 thirdparty companies had memory expansion of 4 or 8
megs. I have 6 or so 3/50 boxes with 8 or 12 megs total.

I think that Sun thought of these as xterminals, but companies wanted
something cheaper than the 3/60 to run UNIX. ( 3/60 was $10k-$15k )

It was an abortion. There is a memory hole at 4 megs for the frame buffer,
so the kernel plus its buffers must fit in 4 meg.

>My 486sx with 4 megs of RAM compiled a kernel just fine. It was 
>running the ISA-only kernel, and the compile only took 40+ days.
>It wouldn't have taken that long but I moved and had to stop it.

In the corner I have a 486DX/33 loaded with 1.0A. I will have to bring it
up and see how long it takes to build a kernel. As I remember, it was about
1.5 hours.

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