[lubuntu-users] 19.4 installer has 8gig minimum disk requirement

Ralf Mardorf ralf.mardorf at alice-dsl.net
Thu Apr 25 16:29:34 UTC 2019


Hi,

don't worry, this reply continues the off-topic discussion, but then
"RTN" on-topic.

On Thu, 2019-04-25 at 16:31 +0200, Liam Proven wrote:
> On Thu, 25 Apr 2019 at 16:07, Ralf Mardorf <ralf.mardorf at alice-dsl.net> wrote:
> > "Ordinary" people wonder why the values aren't 250 instead of 256, 500
> > instead of 512, 1000 instead of 1024. They might or might not understand
> > the technically reasons. However, they don't gain anything from base 10
> > over base 2.
> 
> Sure. But the battle was lost even in 1985 when Atari did this:
> 
> http://www.atarimania.com/catalog-atari-atari-germany-10-85_108_S.html
> 
> The Atari ST 520 had 512 kiB of RAM, but Atari "rounded it up." The ST
> 1040 had twice that, but it had to be twice the "520" model's, so even
> though there is no way that 1024 kiB can be rounded to 1040 kB, the
> model was named 1040.

That is an absurd comparison.

The prospectus is completely confusing, it claims that the 520 ST comes
with 1 MB main memory.

My original Atari 520 ST user manual mentions 512 KB RAM and 192 KB ROM,
where the manual's "KB" is for KiB. IIRC software, but without doubts
the manual and related books use base 2 without any rounding at all.

I doubt that the rounded off name should fake to provide 520 KiB, nor do
I think that it does confuse. I dislike it anyway and guess 512 would
have been a better choice for the name.

Here is a photo of my Atari 520 ST: https://i.imgur.com/lx5pucp.jpg
You might notice that the original 512 KiB are replaced by a (4 MiB) PC
RAM bar and a few cables. If you zoom in, you might notice that it has
got a 80268 CPU (in addition to the original MC68000). Unfortunately
it's more or less impossible to add a blitter to the 520 ST, but TOS is
replaced by a later release, too.

I don't have seen a lot of Atari ST, TT etc. without modifications, but
probably thousands with modifications, most of them for sure with a
hardware QL emulator. It was another time when we used this machine and
other than the Amiga, the ST was mainly used by what we might call
nowadays "nerds". Most of them for sure QL nerds. Another that large
group often were "ordinary people" who were musicians, but probably with
friends like me who were musicians as well as "techies" who again had
other friends who were "techies", too.

Apropos emulations. The OP wrote: "I created a 6g QEMU image."

"Ordinary people" unlikely will use QEMU. IMO handling "space" used by
emulations is more easily done by taking care about base 2 unites, than
base 10.

Regards,
Ralf




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