Comment by hn_acc1

17 hours ago

At work at the time (I was an intern), in 1993, we ran SCO Unix on a 25 MHz 386sx with 8 MB and another 6 MB on an add-in card on the ISA bus. And while the compilation with Motif was a bear (1 hour for a 1 MB executable), the actual app was reasonably snappy.

I can't imagine how FAST that system would feel with modern hardware.

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hn_acc1

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lproven  7 hours ago

> SCO Unix on a 25 MHz 386sx with 8 MB and another 6 MB on an add-in card

OK, SCO Xenix not SCO Unix, but I deployed production Xenix boxes with 4MB of RAM on 80386DX processors.

It ran well and supported 4-6 users no problem. As I recall, one customer had 8 users and they needed a RAM upgrade. I think, dimly now as this wasn't my department, it was eye-wateringly expensive. Something in the region of £5,000 to £6,000 (at the time, $10K+).

We did deploy one box with just 2 MB of RAM, but that didn't work well once a few users on terminals logged in. They had to upgrade the RAM.

FWIW these were 32-bit 386 machines, but with no CPU cache – the lower-end IBM PS/2 Model 80 variants of the time, with 16 MHz and 20 MHz CPUs. (The top-end 25MHz Model 70 had a small SRAM cache for the CPU. It cost over £10,000 with no screen, keyboard or mouse, and my Acorn Archimedes A310, which cost me £800, absolutely smoked it: it was about 4x as fast.)

That's when I knew Arm would eventually eat x86: in 1989. It's finally happening now.

But I was running PC DOS and DOS software in a window on my ARM desktop in 1989, in pure software emulation, and it was sluggish but usable. CPU was equivalent to a 2-2.5 MHz 8086, but disk performance was better than a screaming fast SCSI disk, so it balanced out.

anthk  6 hours ago

I tried EMWM with Motif based tools (from Vim to Emacs, EMWM, XFile, Ximaging, Classic-Colors (and even tried to write a simple UI for Mplayer) under a 10-15 year old n270 based netbook.

https://fastestcode.org/emwm.html

It ran really fast. Also, if Dillo ran snappy under a 486 (today so-so except for a slight delay because of TLS, but bearable once the page it's rendered), Dillo today runs at light speeds. This on my n270 netbook under OpenBSD. With NetBSD, it would run slightly faster.