On Sun, Mar 15, 2020 at 7:28 AM ZB <zbigniew2...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Sat, Mar 14, 2020 at 12:47:33AM -0500, Rugxulo wrote: > > > It's amazing to me that so many people still use 486s with FreeDOS. > > For most DOS applications 486 is kind of "numbercruncher" - and, besides, > if you use Intel 486 CPU you'll get fanless "silent PC" (AMD 486 requires > fan; I mean at least these faster 100/120 MHz versions, nut sure what about > slower ones). Having, say, 32 MB RAM at your disposal - what more you can > need for DOS?
IIRC, the 486 was essentially a 386 with floating point math processor added on the same die, instead of having to use a separate chip in separate socket. (And if memory serves, there were cheaper 486 models that disabled the FPU and what you had was essentially a 386. Many folks simply didn't need on-chip floating point. The calculations could be done in software, and hardware just made it quicker.) You certainly don't need 32MB RAM for DOS itself. If you have the software, you can use some of the RAM for disk cache and RAMdisk, but most will be untouched. > Today typically we've got around 32 GB RAM in our machines - 1000x more - > just to move bloat, created using "modern technologies", back and forth > within that vast space I'm not sure how typical that is. I'm configuring a new desktop at the moment, and it came with 16GB. It can be *expanded* to 32GB, but I have no need. (The machine it replaces had 8GB, expandable to 32GB, and I didn't use all of that.) If I were a developer trying to build from a large local source tree, and wanted the build to complete in a reasonable time, I'd certainly want 32GB RAM, or even more (but I'd need a fancy motherboard to do it.) Likewise if I was doing demanding stuff in Photoshop, which wants all the RAM you can give it, or video editing. The sweet spot for Win10 appears to be 6GB RAM. It will use more if you have it, but 6GB is where you start and performance on basic tasks will be reasonable. But depending upon what you do, much of that stuff is *not* bloat. DOS grew up in the days when hardware was expensive and machines it would run on would be limited. Hardware is now cheap and getting cheaper. Lots of things can be done now because of that. The previous limits were cost based, and there were things you might like to do but simply couldn't afford to. Now you can. (A correspondent elsewhere talked about migrating a database server he administered from 16TB of SATA HDs to 16TB of SSDs. He saw an order of magnitude performance increase. The DBMS *screamed* through queries and updates. The significant point was that costs for NAND Flash and the SSDs that used it had dropped to the point that he could *afford* to make the switch. We are only seeing the tip of that iceberg.) Software growth is a part of that. Because hardware is cheap, there isn't need to optimize for *size*. And optimization is what the compiler does for you, and does it better than you can. Overly clever programmer attempts to optimize their own code can fool the compiler and result in bigger, slower code. There are folks still concerned with size, but they are developing in the embedded space for IoT devices and the like, and using a different set of toolchains, provided by the HW vendors for developing on their devices. The scarce resource is developer time, and anything that can make developer's jobs easier and them more productive is looked on with favor. I date from the days when the original IBM PC with (up to) 640KB RAM, CGA graphics, and dual 5" 360KB floppies were first appearing on corporate desktops as engines to run Lotus 123. I learned a fair number of tips and tricks to wring the most of of the machines I used. I'm *very* happy to live now and not have to do that any more. I play with DOS and DOS apps for fun, as a hobby, in spare free time. Actual work gets done elsewhere. Most of what I do on a daily basis simply can't be *done* in DOS. And none of what is on my machine can be classified as "bloat". It needs to be that big to do its job, and I have the resources to support it and don't care. > Zbigniew ______ Dennis _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
