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The discussion is about PkZIP which ran on DOS PC's, so your experience in the UNIX world is going to be very different. Life was different in 16-bit, PC XT/AT
by bluedino 5y ago
The discussion is about PkZIP which ran on DOS PC's, so your experience in the UNIX world is going to be very different. Life was different in 16-bit, PC XT/AT land with 640k.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y agoSure. But this started with a comment that said "computing was different back then". Not the same thing at all. Also, note that in 1989, Xenix and others ran quite happily on the sort of hardware you're citing, so MS-DOS is/was the actual "limiting factor".
- bluedino 5y agoThe people that were using UNIX workstations back then, even Xenix, compared to MS-DOS was probably 1 to 1000.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y agoSure. But MS-DOS didn't define "computing" in 1989. I think it's fine to say something like "pkzip was developed on a platform with a lot of limitations, and you can see some of them in both the program and file format designs". It's quite different to claim that the design of pkzip somehow reflected the general state of computing in 1989 - it just isn't true.
- bluedino 5y agoI'd argue that it did, again for 1 out of 1000 people. Remember that the 'rest of the computing world' didn't really catch up to the early UNIX workstations until Windows 2000/XP.