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Date:      Mon, 2 Oct 1995 13:27:11 -0400
From:      dennis@etinc.com (dennis)
To:        Brian Tao <taob@io.org>
Cc:        hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD 2.1 will require a minimum of 8MB for installation.
Message-ID:  <199510021727.NAA10736@etinc.com>

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B. Tao writes...

>On Sun, 1 Oct 1995, dennis wrote:
>>
>> Great Idea! Lets lose the established users who are pushing for the O/S to
>> support the idiots. Let's eliminate those that are building systems based on
>> FreeBSD in hopes of luring the occasional one-time user.  This is a great
>> business decision.
>
>    It's the "idiots" and the "one-time user" that are more likely to
>have deficient hardware than those who are already accustomed to
>building FreeBSD boxes.  Those in the latter group can still go for
>the full 8Mb installation kernel.  Who says we have to have one or the
>other?

Thats the point. Smaller is better for everyone. You don't want to end up
like wordperfect, whose marketing dept assumed that everyone was using
Pentiums with lots of memory, because their  product was unusable on
everything else. Is it OK to write bad code because 'processors are fast"
and "memory is cheap"? We develop and test our software on the slowest,
least loaded machines available, and if it doesn't perform adaquately it
doesn't make it out the door, even if a large portion of the market has
pentiums. If you abandon the 4MB limit now, pretty soon you'll be squeezing
it into 8. Sound like a Microsoft story?

db
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