iverson@cory.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (06/15/87)
In article <1205@botter.cs.vu.nl> ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum) writes: >A recent survey in a local computer hobby magazine showed that only 5% of >the readers had a hard disk. 95% worked with floppy only. In my own dept. >I know that very few students have hard disks, and even among the faculty >members here who have a computer at home, I believe that I am the only one I think that perhaps you have been mislead by the survey. Of all the students I know with PC's, most don't have hard disks. But, *all* the CS students (with PC's) that I know do own hard disks. A Political Science major may not need a hard disk to use WordStar, but then he isn't going to be using MINIX either. He certainly won't want to recompile it for any reason. So, the survey is correct, but it has lead you the wrong way. Of the PC owning population, perhaps 1% will ever own MINIX. I would guess that 90% of the 1% would be professional types (programmers, analysts, etc.) who plan on modifying it in some way and that only a small fraction would *not* own a hard drive. Judging from the net traffic on hard drives in this group and comp.sys.ibm.pc, I would say that I'm not far off base. Actually, the fact that MINIX does all of these outre hacks to get around the lack of a hard drive (RAM disk, no swapping, etc.) probably limits the effectiveness of MINIX as a teaching tool as well. How many real UNIX's use a RAM disk, or don't swap? Even in the TOY OS (yes, that's it's name) we used in our OS class, swapping was performed. I know MINIX is just a toy, that doesn't mean it has to be weird, too. Perhaps you should reconsider your stance on the utility of a MINIX that requires a hard drive. - Tim Iverson iverson@cory.Berkeley.EDU ucbvax!cory!iverson