On Sep 29, 2016, at 1:47 PM, Dave McGuire via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
On 09/28/2016 02:40 PM, Jason Perkins via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
It's amusing to consider NT4e "huge", the whole thing runs off of an 8gb IDE hard drive, with 2 2gb FAT partitions. The whole thing takes up only 700mb, 8mb of which is the configuration and logging database. But... compared to 100s of KB in a C64 it is much more overhead :)
It's all relative. I work with embedded systems with no mass storage, but a full IP stack and cellular communications, along with sensor I/O and data acquisition/reduction, with a less than 120KB code footprint. Controlling an HVAC system (for example) doesn't really involve much more than that.
A fun followup to this thread: http://www.geek.com/news/commodore-amiga-computer-has-been-running-the-achea... Of course, an Amiga 2000 is a significantly bigger beast than a C64, but somewhat smaller than an NT4 box with a multi-GB hard drive. The article, of course, does highlight the major problem with such systems that usually are the main thing that lead to their replacement: maintenance (which is why my old company ended up making a Core2 Duo real-time NI system to replace a steel mill's old Multibus-based controller; the system worked, but was dying, and spares were becoming nearly impossible to find even on eBay). - Dave