9 ms·
Not to disrespect this, but it used to be entirely normal to have a GUI environment on a machine with 2MB of RAM and a 40MB disk. Or 128K of ram and 400 kb dis
by trollbridge 11mo ago
Not to disrespect this, but it used to be entirely normal to have a GUI environment on a machine with 2MB of RAM and a 40MB disk.
Or 128K of ram and 400 kb disk for that matter.
- Perz1val 11mo agoYea, but those platforms were not 64bit
- monocasa 11mo ago64 bit generally adds about 20% to the size of the executables and programs as t to last on x86, so it's not that big of a change.
- IAmLiterallyAB 11mo agoSwitch to an ILP32 ABI and you get a lot of that space back
- maccard 11mo agoA single 1920x1080 framebuffer (which is a low resolution monitor in 2025 IMO) is 2MB. Add any compositing into the mix for multi window displays and it literally doesn’t fit in memory.
- echoangle 11mo agoDo you really need the framebuffer in RAM? Wouldn't that be entirely in the GPU RAM?
- jerrythegerbil 11mo agoTo put it in GPU RAM, you need GPU drivers. For example, NVIDIA GPU drivers are typically around 800M-1.5G. That math actually goes wildly in the opposite direction for an optimization argument.
- Rohansi 11mo ago> NVIDIA GPU drivers are typically around 800M-1.5G. They also pack in a lot of game-specific optimizations for whatever reason. Could likely be a lot smaller without those.
- jsheard 11mo agoDoesn't the UEFI firmware map a GPU framebuffer into the main address space "for free" so you can easily poke raw pixels over the bus? Then again the UEFI FB is only single-buffered, so if you rely on that in lieu of full-fat GPU drivers then you'd probably want to layer some CPU framebuffers on top anyway.
- the8472 11mo agowell, if you poke framebuffer pixels directly you might as well do scanline racing.
- jsheard 11mo agoAlas, I don't think UEFI exposes vblank/hblank interrupts so you'd just have to YOLO the timing.
- throwaway173738 11mo agoYes if you have UEFI.
- znpy 11mo agoAren’t you cheating by having additional ram dedicated for gpu use exclusively? :)
- sigwinch 11mo agoVGA standard supports up to 256k
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- maccard 11mo agoYou’re assuming a discrete GPU with separate VRAM, and only supporting hardware accelerated rendering. If you have that you almost certainly have more than 2MB of ram
- ErroneousBosh 11mo agoComputers didn't used to have GPUs back then when 150kB was a significant amount of graphics memory.
- trollbridge 11mo agoThe IBM PGC (1984) was a discrete GPU with 320kB of RAM and slightly over 64kB of ROM. The EGA (1984) and VGA (1987) could conceivably be considered a GPU although not turning complete. EGA had 64, 128, 192, or 256K and VGA 256K. The 8514/A (1987) was Turing complete although it had 512kB. The Image Adapter/A (1989) was far more powerful, pretty much the first modern GPU as we know them and came with 1MB expandable to 3MB.
- ErroneousBosh 11mo agoNeither EGA or VGA were "GPUs", they were dumb framebuffers. Later VGA chipsets had rudimentary acceleration, basically just blitters - but that was a help. The PGC was kind of a GPU if you squint a bit. It didn't work the way a modern GPU does where you've got masses of individual compute cores working on the same problem, but it did have a processor roughly as fast as the host processor that you could offload simple drawing tasks to. It couldn't do 3D stuff like what we'd call a GPU today does, but it could do things like solid fills and lines. In today's money the PGC cost about the same as an RTX PRO 6000, so no-one really had them.
- Yeask 11mo agoA video card is not a GPU.
- lproven 11mo ago> The 8514/A (1987) was Turing complete WTF? Tell me more! I have one, but I have no matching screen so I never tried it... Maybe it's worth finding a converter.
- ohhellnawman 11mo ago[dead]
- snek_case 11mo agoI had a 386 PC with 4MB of RAM when I was a kid, and it ran Windows 3.1 with a GUI, but that also had a VGA display at 640x480, and only 16-bit color (4 bits per pixel). So 153,600 bytes for the frame buffer.
- Dwedit 11mo ago640 * 480 / 2 = 150KB for a classic 16-color VGA screen.
- perching_aix 11mo ago> and only 16-bit color (4 bits per pixel). The "high color" (16 bit) mode was 5:6:5 bits per channel, so 16 bits per pixel. > So 153,600 bytes for the frame buffer. And so you're looking at 614.4 KB (600 KiB) instead.
- snek_case 11mo ago"Windows 3.1 primarily used palette-based color modes, common modes included 16 colors (VGA/EGA) and 256 colors (SuperVGA)"
- perching_aix 11mo agoRight, so 16 color, not 16 bit color. To be frank, I wasn't aware such a mode was a thing, but it makes sense.
- mananaysiempre 11mo agoI recently installed NT4 (including Plus!) in an emulator with a VESA video driver, and was greatly surprised when about half of the icons that I thought of as “Windows 2000” (including the memorable “My Computer” one with the bulbous sky-blue screen) turned out to be available even there, provided a non-indexed mode. The rest were the more familliar 16-color-compatible 95/NT4 ones, making for an incongruous result overall. I guess what I want to say is that 16-color compatibility is a large part of the 95/NT4 look from which 2000 very carefully departed.
- bobmcnamara 11mo agoIt's so much fun working with systems with more pixels than ram though. Manually interleaving interrupts. What joy.
- em3rgent0rdr 11mo agoIf you use a tile-based hardware renderer, such as on the original nintendo chip, then pixels are rendered on the fly to the screen by the hardware automatically pulling pixels based on the tile map.
- beagle3 11mo agoThe Amiga 500 had high res graphics (or high color graphics … but not on the same scanline), multitasking, 15 bit sound (with a lot of work - the hardware had 4 channels of 8 bit DACs but a 6-bit volume, so …) In 1985, and with 512K of RAM. It was very usable for work.
- mrits 11mo agoa 320x200 6bit color depth wasn't exactly a pleasure to use. I think the games could double the res in certain mode (was it called 13h?)
- krige 11mo agoFor OCS/ECS hardware 2bit HiRes - 640x256 or 640x200 depending on region - was default resolution for OS, and you could add interlacing or up color depth to 3 and 4 bit at cost of response lag; starting with OS2.0 the resolution setting was basically limited by chip memory and what your output device could actually display. I got my 1200 to display crisp 1440x550 on my LCD by just sliding screen parameters to max on default display driver. Games used either 320h or 640h resolutions, 4 bit or fake 5 bit known as HalfBrite, because it was basically 4 bit with the other 16 colors being same but half brightness. The fabled 12-bit HAM mode was also used, even in some games, even for interactive content, but it wasn't too often.
- teamonkey 11mo agoYou might be thinking of DOS mode 13h, which was VGA 320x200, 8 bits per pixel.
- bananaboy 11mo agoAnd 6-bits per colour component.
- oso2k 11mo agoVGA color palette was 18-bits/256K, but input into the palette was 8-bit per channel. (63,63,63) is visibly different from (255,255,255). http://qzx.com/pc-gpe/tut2.txt http://qzx.com/pc-gpe/tut2.txt http://qzx.com/pc-gpe/ http://qzx.com/pc-gpe/
- perching_aix 11mo agoMore like 6.2+ MB, or at least I'd sure hope that a FHD resolution is paired with at least a 24 bit (8 bpc) SDR color. And then there's the triple buffered vsync at play, so it's really more like 18.6+ MB.
- BobbyTables2 11mo agoMy video card then didn’t have video ram for 256 color SVGA…
- SoftTalker 11mo agoThose old computers were 640x480 or so. Maybe smaller.
- AshamedCaptain 11mo agoYou do not really need a framebuffer to drive a GUI, though. That's very much a PC thing.
- embedding-shape 11mo ago> Or 128K of ram and 400 kb disk for that matter. Or 32K of RAM and 64KB disk for that matter. What's your point? That the industry and what's commonly available gets bigger?
- forinti 11mo agoThe Acorn Archimedes had the whole OS on a 512KB ROM. That said, OSs came with a lot less stuff then.
- psychoslave 11mo agoIf that is a lot less of things not needed for the specific use case, that is still a big plus.
- pastage 11mo agoIt was GUI defined manually by pixel coordinates, having more flexible guis that could autoscale and other snazy things made things really "slow" back then.. Sure we could go back... Maybe we should. But there are lots of stuff we take for granted to day that were not available back then.
- masfuerte 11mo agoThe OS did ship with bezier vector font support. AFAIK it was the first GUI to do so. P.S. I should probably mention that there wasn't room in the ROM for the vector fonts; these needed to be loaded from some other medium.
- xyzzy3000 11mo agoRISC OS has the concept of "OS units" which don't map directly onto pixels 1:1, and it was possible to fiddle with the ratio on the RiscPC from 1994 onwards, giving reasonably-scaled windows and icons in high-resolution modes such as 1080p. It's hinted at in this tutorial, but you'd have to go through the Programmer's Reference Manual for the full details: https://www.stevefryatt.org.uk/risc-os/wimp-prog/window-theory https://www.stevefryatt.org.uk/risc-os/wimp-prog/window-theo... RISC OS 3.5 (1994) was still 2MB in size, supplied on ROM.
- xyzzy3000 11mo agoThat's only RISC OS 2 though. RISC OS 3 was 2MB, and even 3.7 didn't have everything in ROM as Acorn had introduced the !Boot directory for softloading a large amount of 'stuff' at boot time.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 11mo agoI would like to have this again I prefer to use additional RAM and disk for data not code
- beng-nl 11mo agoTo think that the entire distro would fit in a reasonable LLC (last level cache)..
- bobmcnamara 11mo agoI've been wondering if I could pull the DIMM from a running machine if everything was cached. Probably not due to DMA buffers. Maybe a headless machine. But would be funny to see.
- veqq 11mo agoLike the k language!
- oso2k 11mo agoThere’s an installation option to run apps off disk. It’s called “The Mount Mode of Operation: TCE/Install”.
- taylodl 11mo agoWhen I first started using QNX back in 1987/88 it was distributed on a couple of 1.4MB floppy diskettes! And you could install a graphical desktop that was a 40KB distribution!
- croes 11mo agoWith 320x240 pixels and 256 colors
- trollbridge 11mo ago640x480 with 16 colours was standard in offices in the late 80s. If you were someone special, you got 1024x768.
- Yeask 11mo agoAnd a 20kg monitor.
- nilamo 11mo ago"640k ought to be enough for everyone!"
- bigiain 11mo agoAnyone else remember the QNX demo disk from the late '90s? A full unix-like GUI environment that booted from a 1.44MB floppy disk. Ran super responsively in 386 machines with 8MB of RAM.
- Suppafly 11mo agoThey had a free distro for a while, it's was pretty exciting being real time and with a microkernel and such. As a CS student it was neat to see where the world of computing might have went if different decisions had been made in the past.
- Scoundreller 11mo agoHere’s a blast of classic internet: http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html No ssl, probably so you can access that site on the browser
- BobbyTables2 11mo agoI agree. That system even had MS word in something like 2-5MB of storage. Windows 3.1 was only something like 16MB of storage. Imagine the Cray supercomputer in those days being used to run a toaster or doorbell…