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Re: Ancient History

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On Tue, 8/25/2026 12:41 AM, rbowman wrote:
> In my OCD quest to rejuvenate old machines I finally dug out the tower 
> buried under other junk out in the shed. Turns out it's a Compaq Presario 
> 4550. It has a 233 MHz AMD K6 that was AMDs challenge to the Pentium II. 
> It was pin compatible and could be used in a Socket 7 board. It has 48 MB 
> of RAM (no, that's not a typo) and a 4 GB HDD. For your computing 
> convenient, it has a 56K modem. There are 2 USB ports although I think it 
> expects the mouse and keyboard to be plugged into the PS2 ports.
> 
> Two distros that claim to run in 48 MB are Tiny Core and Slax. slax 
> specifies text only unless you have more RAM. Tiny Core isn't very 
> specific.
> 
> I think I'll let that sleeping dog slumber on although I might see if it 
> boots at all. 
> 
> Now for the real puzzle. I was a fairly decent machine in 1997 and came 
> with Windows 95. Windows 95 claimed a minimum of 4 MB, recommended 8 MB, 
> and if you had 16 MB or more didn't bother creating a swap file. What the 
> flaming hell has happened to us?  Even by Windows 98 24 MB was 
> recommended. Now you can barely run a pared down Linux in 48 MB and I 
> doubt it's a very appealing UX.
> 

https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=50935

    "I find working through all the "trouble" to be more rewarding than the result."

A lot of software you could run on such a machine, would have an "SSE2 requirement",
so you may have to stick with software from the era.

At one time, packed data structures were "quite popular". Today, you can have
an individual write an image utility, where instead of using 24 bits for
a pixel, "each color is represented by a 64 bit number" or "we're using a floating
point number for R, for G, and for B". Proud claims of piggish design :-)
The reason I note this, is one day, I attempted to open an image,
sure, the image was a large one, the machine returns "out of RAM".
And that's when I started checking for what exactly they were
doing inside. You do an eye roll. You're yelling "why would you do this?".
And so on :-)

   Paul

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Ancient History rbowman <bowman@montana.com> - 2026-08-25 04:41 +0000
  Re: Ancient History c186282 <c186282@nnada.net> - 2026-08-25 03:15 -0400
    Re: Ancient History John Ames <commodorejohn@gmail.com> - 2026-08-25 08:19 -0700
      Re: Ancient History The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2026-08-25 19:57 +0100
  Re: Ancient History "Carlos E.R." <robin_listas@es.invalid> - 2026-08-25 11:41 +0200
    Re: Ancient History Nuno Silva <nunojsilva@invalid.invalid> - 2026-08-25 11:53 +0100
      Re: Ancient History The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2026-08-25 12:54 +0100
        Re: Ancient History rbowman <bowman@montana.com> - 2026-08-25 19:25 +0000
      Re: Ancient History "Carlos E.R." <robin_listas@es.invalid> - 2026-08-25 14:23 +0200
    Re: Ancient History The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2026-08-25 12:31 +0100
      Re: Ancient History Chris Ahlstrom <OFeem1987@teleworm.us> - 2026-08-25 07:53 -0400
      Re: Ancient History Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> - 2026-08-25 18:26 +0000
        Re: Ancient History rbowman <bowman@montana.com> - 2026-08-25 19:37 +0000
    Re: Ancient History rbowman <bowman@montana.com> - 2026-08-25 19:16 +0000
      Re: Ancient History The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2026-08-25 20:21 +0100
        Re: Ancient History rbowman <bowman@montana.com> - 2026-08-26 04:40 +0000
  Re: Ancient History The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2026-08-25 12:30 +0100
  Re: Ancient History "Mr. Chang Man-wai" <toylet.toylet@gmail.com> - 2026-08-25 20:07 +0800
  Re: Ancient History Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> - 2026-08-25 11:20 -0400
    Re: Ancient History Robert Riches <spamtrap42@jacob21819.net> - 2026-08-25 17:44 +0000
    Re: Ancient History Lawrence D’Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> - 2026-08-25 21:55 +0000

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