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My modern NeXT lament is that was had an extraordinary machine that ran Unix with a Postscript based windowing environment, and some rather remarkable applicati

My modern NeXT lament is that was had an extraordinary machine that ran Unix with a Postscript based windowing environment, and some rather remarkable applications, written in a "slow" C language, on a 25Mhz '040 with 400M of disk and 20MB of RAM. Meanwhile, getting Linux to run on a R Pi is a major endeavor. I don't know how light you can get a Unix with, I guess, X running on it today.

icedchai 5y ago
My first Linux box was a 386SX with 3 megs of RAM. This was in the 0.99.x kernel days. I later upgraded to a 486/100 with 16 megs. Linux (Slackware, kernel 1.0!) ran like lightning on that thing, including X and an early browser like Netscape. I would often have over a dozen users logged in remotely (telnet...) Things are incredibly bloated today.
rjsw 5y ago
I have run NetBSD on my Mac Quadra 950 with X, only ran a few xterms but it was fine.
hungryforcodes 5y ago
Love your story! R Pi seems ok these days though. Just loaded Armbian on an SD card and away it went. Descent performance even.
rbanffy 5y ago
> Meanwhile, getting Linux to run on a R Pi is a major endeavor. I don't really think downloading a disk image and copying it to a microSD qualifies as a major endeavor.
- speed_spread 5y ago
  Considering that a Pi CPU sill runs about 50 times as fast and has 100 times more memory than a NeXT had, whatever Unix you get running on it doesn't have to be "light" by OP's measure. With a 25Mhz CPU and 16MB of RAM, every cycle and byte has to be accounted for.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    OK, but Linux is the default OS for the RPis. They spin their own distro based on Debian.
rbanffy 5y ago
I did run NetBSD on my MIPS-based IBM z50 w/ 16MB of RAM, complete with ethernet and X and twm. But then a 16MB RISC Unix workstation wasn't really low-end Sadly, it wasn't possible to make it boot directly to BSD - it always needed a pass through Windows CE
sys_64738 5y ago
Were those not mostly lightweight MOTIF apps? RPi Linux distros running heavyweight GUI desktops are the problem.

icedchai 5y ago

My first Linux box was a 386SX with 3 megs of RAM. This was in the 0.99.x kernel days. I later upgraded to a 486/100 with 16 megs. Linux (Slackware, kernel 1.0!) ran like lightning on that thing, including X and an early browser like Netscape. I would often have over a dozen users logged in remotely (telnet...) Things are incredibly bloated today.

rjsw 5y ago

I have run NetBSD on my Mac Quadra 950 with X, only ran a few xterms but it was fine.

hungryforcodes 5y ago

Love your story! R Pi seems ok these days though. Just loaded Armbian on an SD card and away it went. Descent performance even.

rbanffy 5y ago

> Meanwhile, getting Linux to run on a R Pi is a major endeavor. I don't really think downloading a disk image and copying it to a microSD qualifies as a major endeavor.

speed_spread 5y ago
Considering that a Pi CPU sill runs about 50 times as fast and has 100 times more memory than a NeXT had, whatever Unix you get running on it doesn't have to be "light" by OP's measure. With a 25Mhz CPU and 16MB of RAM, every cycle and byte has to be accounted for.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  OK, but Linux is the default OS for the RPis. They spin their own distro based on Debian.

rbanffy 5y ago

I did run NetBSD on my MIPS-based IBM z50 w/ 16MB of RAM, complete with ethernet and X and twm. But then a 16MB RISC Unix workstation wasn't really low-end Sadly, it wasn't possible to make it boot directly to BSD - it always needed a pass through Windows CE

sys_64738 5y ago

Were those not mostly lightweight MOTIF apps? RPi Linux distros running heavyweight GUI desktops are the problem.