[TUHS] /bin vs /sbin

Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com
Wed Jul 22 04:43:35 AEST 2020


On Tue, Jul 21, 2020 at 12:33:25PM -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
> A big cost savings in having 20 diskless workstations was that you didn't
> need the 2-4gb of disks for each individual one, but instead could have one
> copy of the 100MB-200MB of the core OS. When. X started getting libraries
> out the wazoo with toolkit wars, it saved even more. IIRC, the Sun 3/50's
> ethernet port was faster than its disk port, so your diskless workstation
> could be faster than one with a disk (assuming the network wasn't
> overloaded).

Huh, I'm not sure about the Sun 3/50 ethernet being faster than disk.  It
is possible because diskless 3/50's worked fairly well.  The similar
era Apollos were miserable without disk, I wanted nothing to do with
them but I was fine on a 3/50.  Not great but it worked.  They worked
better with 8MB of ram, 4 was tight.


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