Andy Sporner wrote:
> 
> Boris Gjenero wrote:
> 
> > Unfortunately, NetBSD continues the tradition of bloat.  /bin/cat is 33k
> > (yes, stripped!).  With gzip -9 it's down to 19k, so that means it
> > actually contains data and not holes and/or large blocks of zeros.
> 
> Though I would rather not add more fuel to this already long thread, I
> cannothelp but wonder if this is something for the "Retro-computing" thread.

Well, certainly it is a retrocomputing thing in the sense that now you
can get a 600Mhz Alpha system with gigs of disk space and 100's of megs
of ram.  In that case, if /bin/cat was 1 meg you'd prpobably get away
with it.

However, it is a real concern for anybody running these old VAX
systems.  Certainly, even these systems can have respectable amounts of
RAM and large amounts of disk space.  However, they can't really handle
the binary bloat because the CPU performance and disk data transfer
rates aren't that great.  No matter what you do, it *will* significantly
slow down the system.  Right now you can more or less get away with it
(at least if there aren't too many users on the system), but certainly
things would be more pleasant without the bloat.  As for running a real
multiuser system, I'm sure that 4.3BSD would perform better than NetBSD
on an old VAX just because the binaries are smaller.  

Hmm... I guess that the simple answer to this is that people don't care
about binary size as long as they can get away with it.  (Since I can
get away with it current situation I don't care too much)  Still, it'd
be nice if I actually got some useful *functionality* from it (How about
cat with an X Windows interface and an embedded lisp interpreter for
customization?)  OTOH, I guess I do get something out of binary bloat. 
If most people were still happy with MicroVAX II systems then we
wouldn't have Doom (it's too slow on a MicroVAX II).  :-)

> I bought a 16MB memory board for my 3500 for $100 and an 800MB
> dssi drive for the same.  SCSI disks are even cheaper by the MB.

Yeah, disk storage is cheap.  At $5 for an RA80 binary bloat isn't too
much of a problem.  (Though I really need to find where I can get more
of these.  Anybody got any RAxx drives near Windsor or Waterloo, ON?)

-- 
|  Boris Gjenero <bgjenero@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca>              |
|  Home page:  http://www.undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca/~bgjenero/     |
|  "Luke, you're going to find that many of the truths we cling to   |
|  depend greatly on our own point of view." - Obi-Wan Kenobi, ROTJ  |