[CentOS] newbie question on installation over existing Linux

Tue Jun 9 20:14:43 UTC 2015
Warren Young <wyml at etr-usa.com>

On Jun 8, 2015, at 8:16 PM, g <geleem at bellsouth.net> wrote:
> 
> On 06/08/2015 09:11 PM, John R Pierce wrote:
>> On 6/8/2015 6:29 PM, Peter wrote:
>>> You can thank Fedora for making that rather pointless change and 
>>> breaking that capability.
>> 
>> that 'capability' was a holdover of the 1980s when disks were
>> measured in megabytes, and memory in kilobytes, so large file
>> systems were impractical.
> 
> gee, you sure about that?

Yes.

And this is not a case of Fedora picking fights with the rest of the Linux world.  /usr was already assumed to be on the root FS in Solaris, FreeBSD, OS X, and Cygwin well before Fedora made their decision.

Fedora’s late to the party, and CentOS necessarily even later.

> was tha 8 bit or 17 bit?

Unix has never seriously been deployed on 8-bit systems.

Even oddballs like Xenix on 8088 and uCLinux on H8/300 are only “8 bit” because of the external address bus.  These are just gimped 16-bit processors, not true 8-bitters.

Unix started out on a PDP-7, an 18-bit machine, before moving to a PDP-11/20, which was 16-bit, but much more powerful than the -7.  The reduction in word size is a reflection of the rise of ASCII and power-of-2 data size standards, not indicating any real reduction in power.

I don’t know about *any* 17-bit processors.