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====== Minnie is Now 64-Bit ======

12th December 2015

I've just moved my web site, [[http://minnie.tuhs.org|minnie.tuhs.org]], to a 64-bit virtual machine with 2G of virtual RAM and 48G of SSD disk space. To me this is quite amazing because, when I first set minnie up, she ran on a 10MHz 8088 [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_compatible|XT clone]] with 640K of RAM and a 30M RLL disk drive.

When I was at uni (in the late 80s) I got into the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MINIX|Minix]] operating system, and I managed to bring Minix 1.2 up on my XT. It was hard work because I started with Minix 1.1 and it didn't have a driver for my [[http://www.overclock.net/t/422938/1985-seagate-st-238r-30mb| Seagate ST-238R]] hard drive controller. I had to hand-patch 1.1 up to 1.2 from the patches that Andy Tanenbaum sent out on the comp.os.minix Usenet newsgroup.

By the time I'd got Minix working, I was hooked on operating systems and I wanted to contribute back to the community. Australia had just been [[http://www.rogerclarke.com/II/OzIHist.html|connected to the Internet]] and I'd taken a job at a [[https://www.unsw.adfa.edu.au/unsw-adfa| university in Canberra]] with an Internet connection. My XT had been replaced by an AT clone and was sitting idle, so I set it up with [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KA9Q|KA9Q NOS]], a [[http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/37824/Western-Digital-WD8003E-Network-Card/| WD8003E]] thinwire Ethernet card and turned it into an FTP server to host the important Usenet postings about Minix. Google still has a copy of my [[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.archives/aB15wWXAHFQ/o1BhZZkzBlkJ|announcement of "minnie" (]][[http://minnie.tuhs.org/minannounce.txt|cached version]]). In April 1994 minnie was running as a webserver, [[https://web.archive.org/web/19981203073422/http://minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au/|minnie.cs.adfa.edu.au]], just 3 years after the worldwide web had started. Then in [[http://bgp.he.net/dns/tuhs.org#_whois|May 2000]] I registered the //tuhs.org// domain and I switched the [[https://web.archive.org/web/20010501231820/http://minnie.tuhs.org/|web service]] and the FTP service over to this domain.

Each time I bought a new computer to upgrade my home system, I would pass the old hardware down to become the new minnie. So I've gone through all the major changes in PC hardware in the past 30 years: RLL, ESDI, IDE, ATA, 16-bit AT, 32-bit '386 etc. I used to keep a table of the hardware changes:

|**Period Starting** |**CPU** |**Disk Capacity** |**Memory** |**Net Connection** |**Operating System** |
|Early 1990 |10MHz 8088 |30M RLL |640K |10Base2 |KA9Q NOS |
|Circa 1992 |20MHz 286 |80M ESDI |2M |10Base2 |JNOS |
|March 1993 |33MHz 386SX |140M ESDI |4M |10Base2 |386BSD 0.1 |
|Circa 1994 |40MHz 386DX |140M ESDI - 1G IDE |8M |10Base2 |FreeBSD 1.1.5.1 |
|Circa 1996 |100MHz 486 |4G - 16G IDE |16 - 32M |10BaseT |FreeBSD 2.2.8, 3.2 |
|May 2000 |400MHz Celeron |28G - 40G ATA |64M |100BaseTX |FreeBSD 4-STABLE |
|June 2004 |500MHz P3 |40G - 60G ATA |192M |100BaseTX |FreeBSD 4-STABLE |
|June 2005 |2.4GHz P4 |320G ATA |768M |1000BaseTX |FreeBSD 5-STABLE |
|June 2009 |2.4GHz P4 |500G ATA |768M |1000BaseTX |Ubuntu 9.04 |

Around 2010 I moved minnie to a virtual machine hosted in America (we say "in the cloud" now); there was no point in trying to work out how to describe the new hardware, given that it's not real ;-)

Minnie's journey also tracks my own journey through operating systems. When I started, Minix didn't have a working network stack, so I had to use KA9Q NOS on top of MS-DOS (urk!). I'd already fallen in love with [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix|Unix]] and Unix-like systems, so when [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/386BSD|386BSD 0.1]] came out it was obvious that I had to move minnie to a //real// operating system. When 386BSD fell by the wayside it was over to [[https://www.freebsd.org/|FreeBSD]].

FreeBSD was great fun: lots of source code, everything was configurable the way that you wanted. But at some stage I found that keeping the system patched against security vulnerabilities was difficult, and I had to recompile things from source each time there was a patch. I decided to defect over to [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux|Linux]], where I could apt-get dist-upgrade to keep things up to date.

So now it's the end of 2015. I still love the command-line, tweaking the configuration of things, and //vi// is still my editor of choice. But things have come a long way since I hand-patched Minix to get my ST-328R driver to work!

\\