400K is huge! ;-)
Without going into too much detail, here's an interesting tidbit on the
SR-71 Astro-Inertial Navigation System or ANS for short. Sort of like an
R2-D2 unit that provided navigation information for the crew.
The ANS had an internal atomic clock. It had 61 stars in it's database,
and could track these stars in borad daylight. It was programmed to
compensate for the heating and minute warping of the fuselage. And, it
tracked the relative movement of the earth as well.
The maximum error was 1/10 of a mile.
...all this while traveling at Mach 3+
The ANS did all this with 32K of RAM. That's K as in Kilobytes!
Now that is what I call a well programmed device. :-)
Sushi
>On 6/17/02 @ 2:52 AM, Jim Witte wrote:
>
> I've got a 400MHz iMac DV+ with 640 MB RAM, and 10.1.3 is okay. I had
>10.1.5 installed yesterday (before I reinstalled) and it seemed a little
>slower (read probably more memory hungry). <sigh> I can *just barely*
>remember when the MacOS would fit on an 400K disk - with applications
>too! I can clearly remember when System 6 or 7 would only report system
>memory usage of under 6MB, and the system folder was under 70 MB.. I
>guess those days are just gone.. The NeXT cube only had 68030
>processors for God's sake, and under 64MB of RAM. How did we get from
>that (which was a snappy GUI as I recall) to this monstrosity that's
>MacOS X?
>
> (it reminds me of what a person said at a comp sci colloqium here at
>IU recently, as a correlary of sorts to Moore's Law: "processor speed
>doubles every 18 months, but my login time NEVER goes down!")
>
> I also remember when the system folder had at most 70 items in it, and
>you pretty much knew what each one did, and which ones could be removed
>because you'd never use them.. Mac OS X seems better than Linux at
>least on having clear names for *some* of it's files (in the /System and
>/Library dirs), but there's still all that stuff in the /bin and /etc
>dirs that you don't see unless you're root that's as inscrutable as ever.
>
> I also have serious qualms about the efficiency of breaking everything
>up into small files (in a bundle), instead of a big monolithic block
>like OS-8 applications were. Paul and I could probably have a good
>discussion on this, but I need to eat right now..
>
>Jim
>
>> <sigh> OS X already crawls on the 700MHz iBook I have... with 1/700th
>> of=
>> the power, I couldn't imagine what that would be like. It would be
>> like=
>> trying to run OS X on my first Macintosh, a Performa 600CD (33mhz
>> 68030=
>> with 5mb built in RAM).
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