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> If that's bloated, I have bad news about Linux! This remark points you don't realize how bloated NT truly was. In the 2000s I could still run Linux _and XFr

> If that's bloated, I have bad news about Linux! This remark points you don't realize how bloated NT truly was. In the 2000s I could still run Linux _and XFree86_ in under 4MB of RAM. NT in 1993 would just BSOD with less than 10MB of RAM.

mdekkers 3y ago
Which clearly didn’t matter to their target market, which you didn’t represent.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- AshamedCaptain 3y ago
  The GP talks about NT, Mac, etc. in the context of home computers, a market which (by virtue of being ridiculously bloated) NT couldn't actually target for an entire decade (such market was then using OSes where the minimal requirement was more like 0.5MB of RAM). At the very least it is unfair to claim it was ahead of the other OSes in that market, since it literally couldn't even think of competing with them. The parent poster claimed the bloat was because of portability and other metrics, but this is also not true since other very much portable OSes from the next decade still had lesser minimum requirements. NT was not such a good design as it is often claimed. It was a clone of a esoteric big iron OS that they were trying to retrofit on much smaller devices. They had to backpedal on everything from microkernel to personalities in order to be able to actually market it to "their target market".
  - mdekkers 3y ago
    Yet despite all these shortcomings it, and its descendants, were, and continue to be, wildly commercially successful. I genuinely don’t understand all this looking down on what, in hindsight, clearly worked. NT was always marketed and priced for the professional & enterprise markets, so the whole “but what about home computers at the time” rings hollow. NT ushered in a new era of business computing and networking, and more importantly a new era of thinking about and working with technology in the workplace, something its competitors at the time couldn’t manage. Even Novell netware, dearly missed, got steamrolled by NT. You can pooh-pooh NT all you like, and talk about what a shitty clone it was, and how poor the technology was. NT clearly won, at the time.
phendrenad2 3y ago
Am I missing something? Doubling the memory requirement for a piece of software by adding layers of abstraction isn't uncommon, no?
- AshamedCaptain 3y ago
  It's not just doubling, but literally going out of reach for most people in the home market. A comparison with other home OSes of the era is therefore unfair.
  - phendrenad2 3y ago
    I think I object to the term "bloat" as used there. To me, "bloat" means that something is large for no reason. If OS/2 and NT were able to leapfrog the home PC market by using a high-level language, that seems like an acceptable engineering tradeoff.
icedchai 3y ago
I was running Linux pretty early on (1993, SLS Linux, Kernel 0.99.x days.) X barely loaded in 4 megs of RAM back then, so no way was it running in 4 megs in the early 2000's. You are exaggerating. By the the 2000's, desktops with 256+ megs of RAM were common. The bloat across all OSes had begun.
- AshamedCaptain 3y ago
  > so no way was it running in 4 megs in the early 2000's. You are exaggerating. No, I am not. I used to do that with at least 2.2 kernels. https://tldp.org/HOWTO/4mb-Laptops.html https://tldp.org/HOWTO/4mb-Laptops.html But besides, I know 4MB in 2000s was low enough to be awkward. The point is that _it could_. NT in 93 could not even boot with 8MB RAM, and then it was definitely not low.
  - icedchai 3y ago
    From https://tldp.org/HOWTO/4mb-Laptops-1.html#ss1.5 https://tldp.org/HOWTO/4mb-Laptops-1.html#ss1.5 : “It isn't going to run X” This seems to confirm my statement.
    - AshamedCaptain 3y ago
      I still have the machine. Removing all but 4M and booting XFree VGA with an xterm doesn't even use more than 500KiB of swap, so it's actually usable. So is 95. On the same machine, NT 3.5 BSODs. With 12MB is the first I can get it to boot, albeit it complains that some services failed to start, and generally thrashes like hell, using 20MB of swap... You can even try muLinux yourself, albeit it's kernel 2.0, not 2.2, and it opens some X11 utils that bump swap usage to 2MB (not very usable).

mdekkers 3y ago

Which clearly didn’t matter to their target market, which you didn’t represent.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
AshamedCaptain 3y ago
The GP talks about NT, Mac, etc. in the context of home computers, a market which (by virtue of being ridiculously bloated) NT couldn't actually target for an entire decade (such market was then using OSes where the minimal requirement was more like 0.5MB of RAM). At the very least it is unfair to claim it was ahead of the other OSes in that market, since it literally couldn't even think of competing with them. The parent poster claimed the bloat was because of portability and other metrics, but this is also not true since other very much portable OSes from the next decade still had lesser minimum requirements. NT was not such a good design as it is often claimed. It was a clone of a esoteric big iron OS that they were trying to retrofit on much smaller devices. They had to backpedal on everything from microkernel to personalities in order to be able to actually market it to "their target market".
- mdekkers 3y ago
  Yet despite all these shortcomings it, and its descendants, were, and continue to be, wildly commercially successful. I genuinely don’t understand all this looking down on what, in hindsight, clearly worked. NT was always marketed and priced for the professional & enterprise markets, so the whole “but what about home computers at the time” rings hollow. NT ushered in a new era of business computing and networking, and more importantly a new era of thinking about and working with technology in the workplace, something its competitors at the time couldn’t manage. Even Novell netware, dearly missed, got steamrolled by NT. You can pooh-pooh NT all you like, and talk about what a shitty clone it was, and how poor the technology was. NT clearly won, at the time.

phendrenad2 3y ago

Am I missing something? Doubling the memory requirement for a piece of software by adding layers of abstraction isn't uncommon, no?

AshamedCaptain 3y ago
It's not just doubling, but literally going out of reach for most people in the home market. A comparison with other home OSes of the era is therefore unfair.
- phendrenad2 3y ago
  I think I object to the term "bloat" as used there. To me, "bloat" means that something is large for no reason. If OS/2 and NT were able to leapfrog the home PC market by using a high-level language, that seems like an acceptable engineering tradeoff.

icedchai 3y ago

I was running Linux pretty early on (1993, SLS Linux, Kernel 0.99.x days.) X barely loaded in 4 megs of RAM back then, so no way was it running in 4 megs in the early 2000's. You are exaggerating. By the the 2000's, desktops with 256+ megs of RAM were common. The bloat across all OSes had begun.

AshamedCaptain 3y ago
> so no way was it running in 4 megs in the early 2000's. You are exaggerating. No, I am not. I used to do that with at least 2.2 kernels. https://tldp.org/HOWTO/4mb-Laptops.html https://tldp.org/HOWTO/4mb-Laptops.html But besides, I know 4MB in 2000s was low enough to be awkward. The point is that _it could_. NT in 93 could not even boot with 8MB RAM, and then it was definitely not low.
- icedchai 3y ago
  From https://tldp.org/HOWTO/4mb-Laptops-1.html#ss1.5 https://tldp.org/HOWTO/4mb-Laptops-1.html#ss1.5 : “It isn't going to run X” This seems to confirm my statement.
  - AshamedCaptain 3y ago
    I still have the machine. Removing all but 4M and booting XFree VGA with an xterm doesn't even use more than 500KiB of swap, so it's actually usable. So is 95. On the same machine, NT 3.5 BSODs. With 12MB is the first I can get it to boot, albeit it complains that some services failed to start, and generally thrashes like hell, using 20MB of swap... You can even try muLinux yourself, albeit it's kernel 2.0, not 2.2, and it opens some X11 utils that bump swap usage to 2MB (not very usable).