On Wed, Mar 30, 2005 at 03:51:55PM -0500, A. Khattri wrote: > On Wed, 30 Mar 2005, Digby Tarvin wrote: > > > I like modest hardware because it promotes efficient code. And the > > performance is actually perfectly find for most of the software > > development I do. The only time it feels slow is when I use > > crypto software like ssh or large applications like netscape. > > Funny - most people would consider the GNOME desktop or OO to be large > applications these days...
Neither are critical apps for me. I don't have either on my BSD/OS system, so they don't count. I would find it hard to do without a web browser or crypto, but fvwm is perfectly adequate as a WM for my needs, and TeX/LaTeX for formatting text work fine on modest machines. I have tried running OO and KDM on my 166MHz Libretto 100CT (64MB RAM), and they are slow enough on that... > > My gentoo system, on the other hand, has a Tyan motherboard with > > dual 800MHz processors - not the top of the line these days, but > > it still feels rediculously fast compared to my antique.. > > I have four servers with Tyan board (dual Athlon) that run Gentoo very > well. Tyan have a quad-Opteron board Ive been drooling over but the price > tag is 4 figures :-) Yep, impressive. But speed has never been a big deal for me. Once I had a clean, non-segmented architecture with MMU and restartable instruction traps, such as the 68030 (ie something powerful enough to run Unix efficiently) I was happy. Since then it has just been the same thing scaled up in storage and speed. > > Besides, I can remember when 'ram expandable to 1K' was > > a feature... > > First computer I ever used was a Sinclair ZX80 (1K RAM). I used to like the look of the old IMSAI 8080 (still do, as far as the cosmetics go), but that was long before I could afford to buy a computer. 256 bytes of memory as standard... The first one I owned was an Exidy Sorcerer - I think it had 8K RAM. Quite a nice machine in its time. Especially when I finally saved up enough to buy a floppy drive so that I could save my programs before turning off the machine ($2,000.00 at the time). Regards, DigbyT -- Digby R. S. Tarvin [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.digbyt.com -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
