[Klug-general] mount floppy 1.4Mb diskettes

[Peter Frost]

Peter Childs wrote:

> 1.4Mb should be more than big enough for anything, After all Bill
> Gates said that 1Mb of memory is more memory than you'll ever need. so
> by that rule I can fit more on my disk than I can in a computer with
> more memory than we'll ever actually need.....
> 
> Why Then Bill do I need 1024M to run Vista and XP but Linux is still
> quite happy with 128M when 1M was more than I am ever going to need.
> (Linux will run in less, I still have machines with only 22Mb of
> memory but they do struggle a bit, If its got less than 128M windows
> 95 struggled.)
> 
> Peter.


As much fun as it is to mock Bill, in fairness there seems to be no 
evidence that he ever actually said that 640k was more than anyone would 
need, and he denies ever having said it. He did make some comments in 
the nineties (in a Bloomberg interview, I think?) in which he expressed 
surprise that the 640k limit had been reached and exceeded so quickly; 
MS weren't expecting it to happen so fast. The original 640k quote is 
usually attributed to "a newspaper" from 1981 but no-one ever seems to 
know which newspaper it was or what the exact quote was.

If you struggled with 128M in Windows '95 then you must've been running 
some rather high-powered software - I used to run it quite happily with 
32M ;)

Personally, I find that many modern (desktop-oriented) Linux distros 
struggle in anything less than 256M, and most ideally want 512M. That 
said, that fact that you *can* still find some distros which will run a 
modern kernel and toolset in tiny amounts of RAM speaks wonders for 
Linux as a whole.

This message has been brought to you today by the number six and the 
word "procrastination".