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Groups > comp.os.linux.misc > #90534

Re: Ancient History

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On 2026-08-25 12:53, Nuno Silva wrote:
> On 2026-08-25, Carlos E.R. wrote:
> 
>> On 2026-08-25 06:41, 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.
>>>
>>
>> Back then, my machine that would happily run Win 98 had trouble
>> running SuSE Linux. Linux wanted as much ram as possible.
> 
> I used the same machine for Windows 98 and GNU/Linux. Granted, it
> started with 64 MiB and was at some point upgraded to at least 256 MiB

The machine I was talking above had much less than that. I think one 
machine had 5 MiB, later had another with maybe 8 or 16. I don't 
remember for sure.

Not 98, after 95 I had Me.

> (and later a bit more). That Pentium II Slot 1 machine was in use as the
> main desktop until 2008 (by then running Debian for 1-2 years, IIRC),
> while I at some point used KDE 3, it was happy with that amount of
> memory (and could also run e.g. OOo; a laptop with 64 MiB was a bit of a
> different story), and life became easier as at some point I moved away
> from DEs.
> 
> But this is already more than 48 MiB, and probably at a sweet point
> where it was enough memory for the kernel, X11 and applications.
> 
> The biggest challenge was updating (compiling, Gentoo) GCC because of
> insn_attrtab.c [1] :-D
> 
> Other challenges IIRC included Firefox coping with a larger amount of
> open tabs (although it still behaved much better than nowadays), and in
> one specific use case, Egacs, er, Emacs.

FFx caused trashing.


> Overall, Windows 98 was, even considering its issues, a nice system, a
> nice interface usually with light resource requirements. I think the
> only slowdown I remember was browsing DVD media in the Windows Explorer,
> and I have no idea if that was a Windows issue in itself or something
> with that specific optical drive. It's no Windows NT, but there's
> probably a reason it tends to be fondly remembered, even with MICROS~1
> being MICROS~1 (they've, for example, IIRC not released the fix for
> KB312108 (NDIS "Protection Error" on fast enough CPUs [2]), instead
> making it available on request through their support channels... (I have
> no idea if this was on ftp.microsoft.com, I suppose it's possible it was
> there despite this?)).
> 
> [1] <https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=29442> (behind Anubis)
> [2] <http://web.archive.org/web/20040513001718/http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=312108>
> 


-- 
Cheers, Carlos.
ES🇪🇸, EU🇪🇺;

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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 c186282 <c186282@nnada.net> - 2026-08-26 04:25 -0400
          Re: Ancient History The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2026-08-26 09:33 +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 c186282 <c186282@nnada.net> - 2026-08-26 03:28 -0400
          Re: Ancient History The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2026-08-26 09:12 +0100
    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 c186282 <c186282@nnada.net> - 2026-08-26 02:49 -0400
  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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