On Wed, Apr 12, 2017 at 08:31:29PM +0200, Nicolas Kovacs wrote:
Le 12/04/2017 à 19:41, Andrew Holway a écrit :
Between the early 1990's and early 2000's the price of a GB of memory went from ~$100,000 to ~$1000*. I guess a lot of the design decisions made for things like init were focussed on this. In 1995 is was common for server platforms to have 32Mb ram whereas the kernel alone in my PC here at home is consuming just over 500MB. It seems reasonable that software components built in 1997 will not be fit for purpose in 2017.
Back in 2013 I did some Linux training for a company in Montpellier. The first week the server racks hadn't been delivered yet, so we were stuck. In a cupboard, I found an antique Dell Poweredge 1300 server that was out of service, made around 1997 or so. I dusted it off, found a power cable, a monitor, a network cable and a keyboard and connected the thing. It had a P-III 500 MHz processor, 3 x 9 GB SCSI disks and a whooping 128 MB of RAM, and not a single USB port (only parallel).
Similar, much earlier tale of my own. Doing Intro Unix training at a client site. The classroom had PCs with Hummingbird's XDMCP software to remotely connect to a monster HP unix system. On Monday arrival I learned their HP license expired over the weekend and remote access was not possible.
I had my laptop, either a Pentium or P II, running Solaris x86. I put it on the network and had the students point their XDMCP to it. Ran the first two days of class with 12 students plux the console all running X graphical logins. On Wednesday they had us switch to the HP. Some students asked if they could switch back because the laptop seemed more responsive.
Jon