From owner-freebsd-hackers Mon Oct 2 10:24:47 1995 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) id KAA11282 for hackers-outgoing; Mon, 2 Oct 1995 10:24:47 -0700 Received: from etinc.com (etinc-gw.new-york.net [165.254.13.209]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.6.12/8.6.6) with ESMTP id KAA11271 for ; Mon, 2 Oct 1995 10:24:44 -0700 Received: from trumpet.etnet.com (trumpet.etnet.com [129.45.17.35]) by etinc.com (8.6.11/8.6.9) with SMTP id NAA10736; Mon, 2 Oct 1995 13:27:11 -0400 Date: Mon, 2 Oct 1995 13:27:11 -0400 Message-Id: <199510021727.NAA10736@etinc.com> X-Sender: dennis@etinc.com X-Mailer: Windows Eudora Version 2.0.3 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" To: Brian Tao From: dennis@etinc.com (dennis) Subject: Re: FreeBSD 2.1 will require a minimum of 8MB for installation. Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk 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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Emerging Technologies, Inc. http://www.etinc.com Synchronous Communications Cards and Routers For Discriminating Tastes. 56k to T1 and beyond. Frame Relay, PPP, HDLC, and X.25