[net.sources.d] MicroEMACS & GNUmacs

daveb@rtech.UUCP (Dave Brower) (04/24/86)

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In article <452@bu-cs.UUCP> bzs@bu-cs.UUCP (Barry Shein) writes:
>Other than portability problems, how far is the Atari 1040 from being
>able to run GNU emacs? Assume a hard disk. That's around $2K (w/ disk)
>and available now. To push the relevance, what would be a minimal SYSTEM
>for running GNU emacs, rather than the other way around.

I suspect it would be painful to use on a 1040.  I say this having ported
it to a 1M UNIX PC with 20M disk.  It takes forever to load (yes, I know
I have the slow disk), chews up a lot of what little memory there is, and
takes gobs and gobs of disk space.  I pretty much can have the GNU stuff
on the machine, or can have the code of the projects I was working on
before I started the port.  It's pretty mutually exclusive.

I would think a minimal machine for running GNU single or with very few
users would have 2M physical memory, and 40M disk with < 25uS avg.
access time.  A 68010 seems like enough processor once you get it
loaded, as does a 32032.  Certainly Sun-3/50 is wonderful, if only you
didn't have to wait 90 or 120 days ARO.  And they're still not cheap
enough for me to put one in my living room.

The existance of machines that are smaller than this is what prompted my
initial plea for MicroEMACS compatibility.  As Fred Fish noted, there's
a lot to be said for getting your FCEDIT editor in ksh to come up fast,
even if you use GNU for your heavy duty work.

There is definately a point of no return for a dinky-macs.  On the one
that I've been using myself, I drew the line at putting in a real symbol
table that would hold tuning varables as well as command names.  Anyone
who wants a real command interpreter should just get GNU instead of
trying to hack something into a program that wasn't designed that way
from the ground up.  Perhaps the most pragmatic limit is that it should
be able to use small model code on an 8080?86, leaving you with a 64K
limit.  MicroEMACS is now around 40, Jove was pushing it, and so was
Scame.  That (and public domain status) is why I'm rallying around
MicroEMACS for the dinks.




-- 
Red:   "Whadda ya got that big nose for, granny?"
Wolf:  "Just to HAVE, see!"
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