• 0 Posts
  • 60 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 19th, 2025

help-circle


  • Back in the Second Age, my 386 came with 1MB of soldered-on RAM and two slots that could each take 2MB of RAM, for a total of 5. This was still not very much for running OS/2. I made the questionable-even-at-the-time decision to by a very cheap ISA memory extension card with 8MB of RAM. Surprisingly enough, the motherboard recognized all of it. If the operating system had been able to distinguish the two banks of RAM and use it like this (or even just to swap to a ramdrive on the slow ram), it would have been actually good. As it was, everything just ran slowly, but could run more without thrashing.


  • This is pretty interesting. I used a couple of well-known systems of the late 80s to early 90s that had cooperative multitasking and no memory protection. They were certainly usable, and people did real things with them, but I definitely remember hitting the limits. The main thing that hit me with Windows 3.x (on a 16MHz 386) was that a background terminal program could not process interrupts fast enough to keep a 2400 baud Xmodem transfer from crashing while I was playing Minesweeper or Solitaire, or using Word Perfect in the Foreground. I remember Mac IIs being a little better with that sort of thing, but also very subject to user programs bringing the whole system down.















  • they argued that the TESCREAL thesis is little more than a leftist conspiracy theory

    The thing about leftist conspiracy theories… right wing conspiracy theories tend to be things like “the (((lizard people))) are kidnapping and harvesting the adrenochrome from white children”, whereas leftist conspiracy theories tend to be things like “the CIA illegally funded right-wing Latin American militias by illegally selling arms to a country that had in recent memory held US diplomats hostage but was, at least, anticommunist”. Leftist conspiracy theories tend to get validated in substance if not in details a few years after it’s too late for the knowledge to be useful.