On Wed, Apr 12, 2017 at 07:41:33PM +0200, Andrew Holway wrote: > > > > Of course, to be fair, there may have been a *reason* for not doing it > > that way before.... > > > > 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. Just another historic note. Until System V, Release 4, circa 1989 or 90, AT&T's Unix ran on computers with a 64KB memory space. That was just the code though, the data, static, dynamic, and stack were in a second 64KB space. That was all the pdp-11 allowed. The merger of BSD code with AT&T code in SVR4 pushed it off of the pdp-11s. But it still ran on things like the AT&T 3B-20 which had a 1MB virtual memory addressing scheme. Jon -- Jon H. LaBadie jon at jgcomp.com 11226 South Shore Rd. (703) 787-0688 (H) Reston, VA 20190 (703) 935-6720 (C)