Eight Megabytes and Constantly Swapping [was Re:Linux still largely invisible in the marketplace]

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Tim Writer <tim-s/rLXaiAEBtBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org>

| People used to say Emacs stands for Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping!
| That was in the days of 8MB Sun3s.

Actually, we said it in the days before Sun existed.  I think that
first heard it, contemptuously, from Peter Fraser, the main author of
QED for GCOS.

I first tried (Gosling's) EMACS in in the days of 8MB VAX departmental
servers.  Unaffordable, in my opinion.

At about that time I got a Kaypro II which came bundled with an EMACS
subset, Perfect Writer (a relabelled MINCE).  The Kaypro had 64K of
RAM and two floppy drives.  That got me (my fingers) into the EMACS
habit.

I now use JOVE as my main editor.  It is an EMACS subset developed on
a PDP-11 (64K of RAM for code plus 64K for data).  It is bigger now.
Compiled for x86_64:
   text	   data	    bss	    dec	    hex	filename
 137133	  11076	 299276	 447485	  6d3fd	/usr/bin/jove
1019061	2482692	      0	3501753	 356eb9	/usr/bin/emacs
(JOVE's BSS is mostly pre-allocated buffer cache.)

The good parts of EMACS are not fat.

BTW, I think that it is wonderful that I can use the same application
(JOVE) for more than 20 years.  Through umpteen changes to the
platform.  I've used cat(1) for just over 30 years now.
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