Re: Using Debian to manage a multiple OS machine

On 22/08/2024 06:06, 186282@ud0s4.net wrote:

Geez, remember when DOS came on ONE floppy ?
   You could DO STUFF with it, rather COMPLEX
   stuff actually. Not a 'toy' system. Even the
   smallest usable Linux requires a LOT more space.

The correct counter to that is to point out that in no wise was DOS an 'operating system' - it was only a program loader.
In fact you could entirely bypass it to write directly to the hardware and many industrial applications did exactly that, yea even unto running their own multitaskers  and so on.
concurrent CP/M was about the smallest multiuser multitasker OS that was ever crammed onto an 8086 platform IIRC. Or there might have been a real time one or two  as well.
Linux by its nature sets out to be an unrestricted UNIX like system,. complete with all the complexity and bells and whistles needed to have multiple users, multiple processes , interprocess communications, daemons to handle single thread hardware like a disk, multi-layered security, and the ability to intersperse drivers in a rigorous manner to access arbitrary hardware.
In short it is a complete multitasking multiuser general purpose operating system and you simply cannot compare it with DOS.
SCO Unix needed a 386 to run - only Venix IIRC ran off a 286 - badly.
It was extremely successful because it actually worked. At an affordable price
I've seen 256 users  via serial cards running on a 386 running SCO. Extreme, but possible, but 64k users was a more normal limit with 32 being normal.
We ran about 150 over telnet at one point once the TCP/IP worked....:-)
This was PDP/VAX territory ...at a price people could afford.
--
I was brought up to believe that you should never give offence if you can avoid it; the new culture tells us you should always take offence if you can. There are now experts in the art of taking offence, indeed whole academic subjects, such as 'gender studies', devoted to it.
Sir Roger Scruton