> I suppose in principle the RPi Pico could self-host its own OS and devel environment. 520 KB of RAM in the old days was plenty to fit an OS and compiler.
replyWith two cheap PSRAM chips and a bit of trickery, you can upgrade that to 32(.5) MB, which is certainly enough to run a small OS.
In principle you can add even more memory with bank switching, but 32 MB is the limit for a flat address space.
Window 95 ran on 8mb of ram.
replyThe first Amigas had 512k of ram. Both had much less processing power.
With 32mb you could probably run some kind of Linux.
Even better, 8MiB was recommended for Windows 95 but it minimally required just 4.
replyWell, the first Amigas had only 256KB of RAM. Doubling that to 512KB (via a memory expansion card) was a luxury!
replyuCLinux was a real thing for a good long while, though I think at this point real microprocessors are cheap, simple, and widely available enough that there hasn't been much need.
replyWhich “old days” would those be. Sounds like it would be 50 years ago
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reply64k was acceptable 40 years ago.
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