Re: OT: Computers-memory-lane.... [Was: [gentoo-user] Re: How low can you go?]

[Pandu Poluan <pandu@poluan.info>]

On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 16:35, Joost Roeleveld <joost@antarean.org> wrote:
> On Monday 04 April 2011 11:13:58 Pandu Poluan wrote:
>> Oh, the nostalgy... :-)
>>
>> My first computer I believe was an Apple ][, a hand-down from an
>> uncle. It ran only for 1-2 weeks before it went to the Bit Bucket in
>> the Sky.
>
> That's sad, only 2 weeks...
> A friend of my dad got us an apple-emulator, had a game I played a lot untill
> I found out that the game was incomplete and would always crash at the same
> point. It was a point-click adventure...
>
>> Then my parents got me an Atari 800XL. That's where I cut my
>> programming teeth with its built-in BASIC.
>
> Yes, the old days with Basic. I wonder if I still have the old programs... The
> 3.5" floppy-disks are still around somewhere..
>
>> When its floppy drive (5.25") gave up the ghost, I got another
>> hand-down; a PC-XT compatible no-name with a huge (at that time) 20 MB
>> hard disk.
>
> 2nd one we had was a 386sx-16mhz with 2 mb ram and 40mb harddrive.
> I did try to install linux on that once, but the network-install took forever.
> The NIC could do 10mbit half-duples (coax), but effective speed was less.
> Symptoms:
> download 1KB at full speed
> card crashed
> driver resets after 5 minutes
> ... repeat...
>

Okay, I have to be honest: I LOL-ed at that... xD

> That was in 2.0.x kernels and I think I saw a change-log where that driver
> finally got fixed in 2.6.0 (could be mistaken on that. It was an Intel
> Etherlink-16)
>
> I don't have that card anymore.
>
>> Again, it died after serving me & my brother for a couple of years,
>> and we got a "PC Brand 486 SLC" desktop. And there I dabbled in Pascal
>> and ASM, making replacement drivers for MS-DOS :-P ... I still
>> remember tuning QEMM386.sys trying to eke the last bytes of Low
>> Memory...
>
> What's the most low-memory you could get it and still use it?
> I managed to get low memory to around 634KB (If I remember correctly) using
> the memory-tools that came with Norton Utilities at the time.
>

I don't really recall... but around the same number, I guess. 630-something.

Actually, I once managed to get 639KB, but lots of apps became
unstable, so I went slightly more conservative :-)

>> Afterwards, I started university, and its a blur of PC clones (and
>> Windows 9x)... and I shifted mental-gears to become a network engineer
>
> When did you switch to Linux?
>
> I switched when MS Windows 95 crashed once too many and decided to delete some
> files along with it. I didn't bother fixing that installation and eventually
> reclaimed the diskspace and removed it from /etc/lilo.conf.
>

Too many apps* I use day-by-day have only Windows version, so I never
did switch to Linux :-(

First time I ever deployed Linux for day-to-day work was when I
started an IT Training company with my former professor. We installed
Fedora Core but replaced the UI with xfce.

However, not until Ubuntu Hardy did I finally got serious about
migrating to Linux. Currently am still migrating the non-legacy
servers to Linux from Windows

* please consider "games" as "apps" :-P


Rgds,
--
Pandu E Poluan
~ IT Optimizer ~
Visit my Blog: http://pepoluan.posterous.com