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by peterkelly 1335 days ago
Our industry was once capable of building entire operating systems that ran in significantly less than that.
2 comments
charcircuit 1335 days ago
Because those were simpler operating systems and there were tight memory limitations. The industry can still do it if needed.

For an iPhone 12 (which shipped with iOS 14) just the 2 framebuffers for a double buffered display will take up the 15 MiB. Operating systems that are "significantly less than" 15 MiB would not be suitable to run a modern personal computing device.

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pjmlp 1335 days ago
SGI Irix and NeXTSTEP, simpler operating systems...
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the_third_wave 1335 days ago
Why is/was this comment greyed out while it is a good example of complex OSs which in their time were criticised for being heavy while being able to run in the L3 cache of modern CPUs?

Layer upon layer upon yet another layer of abstraction have made it so nobody sees the turtles the whole thing rests on...

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VoxPelli 1335 days ago
A normal icon / avatar today is often recommended to be 512x512 pixels = 262 144 pixels

Back in those days a screen was often 640x480 = 307 200 pixels

An iPhone 12 Mini has a 1080×2340 screen = 2 527 200 pixels = over 8 times the size of those old screens

Today's OS:es work with much much larger datasets overall, not just in graphics but elsewhere as well, and are optimized for that

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