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Re: Ancient History

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On 2026-08-25, Paul <nospam@needed.invalid> wrote:
> 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

What image [mis-]handling software was being that wasteful of
RAM?

ImageMagick also has a limit on the size of a "pixel cache" with
a default of 2GiB.  That limit can be exceeded when working with
fairly high resolution scans of full-page paper documents.
Fortunately, it is fairly easy to specify a larger limit in
/etc/ImageMagick-7/policy.xml

-- 
Robert Riches
spamtrap42@jacob21819.net
(Yes, that is one of my email addresses.)

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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 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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