Dax Kelson responded -- with American prices for desktop PC memory;
> Memory has gotten insanely cheap lately.
>
> $14 for 16MB SIMM
> $26 for 32MB SIMM
> $127 for 128MB DIMM
Things to think of...
* trusty old 386sx's can't take more than 16Mb
* embedded computers where $12 more for 32Mb over 16Mb is significant
* people who aren't in America, as Alan was pointing out and you seemed to
totally ignore
* notebook computers (eg, Libretto comes with 16Mb and to upgrade to 32Mb
is (in Australia at least) expensive; PC110 probably can't even have 8Mb(?))
* people who want to run old ISA cards which use DMA and perform slower with
over 16Mb of RAM
* people who also run VSTa, which has a *maximum* of 16Mb of RAM
* not everyone can install their own RAM
* people who want to run a router on an old 386 - and want their whole ISP
to run on the same OS - might then conclude that they should run their
whole ISP on FreeBSD (etc) if it has better low-memory performance; a
loss to Linux
* people who have old non-Intel machines where memory is difficult to come
by or still very expensive
* many other cases.
One of the main points for Linux in the past has been that it can do great
things with old hardware which is otherwise useless (under Windows) for
modern applications. I'd hate to see this change.
I'd like to see sufficient config options added that Linux would be able to
be run on a 2Mb machine as a router. Or maybe even 640k. But I'm not holding
my breath.
David.
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