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by 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.

1 comments

SGI Irix and NeXTSTEP, simpler operating systems...
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...