Chill out, lockdown ain't over yet – perhaps FUZIX on the Pi Pico could feature in your weekend shed projects Those pondering what to do with the latest Raspberry Pi gizmo, the $4 Pico, have a new option in the form of a FUZIX port. Possibly to be filed under the category of "because we can", the port can be described as an impressive technical achievement, even if there isn't a tremendous amount one can do with the Unix-like OS at …
No, only little Epson computers with possibly a Z80 or related and slim LCD panel in the case, circa 1979 or 1980 had only 32K RAM.
Even an Apple II had 48K.
No real laptop I remember had less than 2M RAM, real ones that ran on battery and had colour mostly 128M and upwards.
Maybe Minix could run on 640K, I forget.
I was the top technical support in the UK for the Epson PX-4. I knew the OS ROM inside out end even sold them (with the non-qwerty keyboard) to all (but one) of the Formula 1 teams (and many others) for lap timing systems when out testing. That was all written in Z80 assembler, including the fixed point maths required for computing speed trap values collected on the barcode input
> Toshiba notebook which has 32kb of RAM
Most likely it had 32Kb of _Video_ RAM. This number would be displayed when booting. To run any minimal version of Linux would require at least a megabyte, probably 2 or 4 of actual RAM.
Maybe you ran Minix but this required 640Kb.
Thanks for the writeup, but:
s/David Givens/David Given/ (throughout)
s/just this hack that/just this hacker that/
Since the blog post I now have the NAND flash, multitasking and pipes working, plus lots of core bugfixes --- Colossal Cave works just fine. So it's useful! Plus, I've discovered I made a mistake with my arithmetic and there's lots more RAM available than I thought: there's about 190kB after the kernel's loaded, and a lot of _that_ can be moved to flash. It should be possible to have multiple processes in RAM concurrently, although with an MMU context switches will require a physical memory copy, so preemptive multitasking won't be feasible. There may even be enough RAM for a NAND-flash-only version, with no SD card.
Oh, yeah! I did know about that, but it was temporarily displaced by the use of 'hacker' in the article. NM, then.
But they still got my name wrong. (You'd be amazed how difficult it is for some people to spell.)
*Update*: I found the 'corrections' link, emailed them, and got a reply back three minutes later saying that it's been fixed. Damn it, Register, you have a reputation to live down to!
I had a 286 with 512k than ran Microport V/AT OK. Programming with the different memory models was a PITA - lot of unix software assumed sizeof(int) == sizeof(char *). Had C & fortran compilers, troff, the works. Used to futz around with code at home, then upload to the Amdahl 570 running UTS at work. Good times.
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