In comp.sys.raspberry-pi, The Natural Philosopher   wrote:
> On 11/12/2019 03:36, Mike Easter wrote:
>> Lighter weight distro/s such as Raspian and others should continue to
>> get the most attention from ARM devices.

Is Raspbian really "light" though? It's a lot lighter than conventional
desktop Linux, but still kinda heavyweight. I had an used a functional
GUI Unix in the 1990s that installed to some 60 megabytes of disk, and
worked with my 4 megabytes of RAM.

These days, you can use Alpine as a super-lightweight Linux, but I
think the GUI install is still more than 60 megs. A good chunk of
Alpine's efficiency comes from ditching the bloated glibc in favor of a
smaller alternative (musl libc) and ditching common bloated Gnu commands
in favor of smaller things like busybox. If you expect bash everywhere,
you'll be sad. But if you just expect a Posix shell, you'll be fine.

> Ditch a GUI and you can run on a z80.

Maybe. I don't know how well a single 8-bit CPU will cope with all
the problems I want to do (including Unicode text processing). But
optimal usage of a z80 could certainly get close for a lot of my
day-to-day stuff. Or, you could have a multiprocessor z80 system.

In comp.misc recently there was a post about a homebuilt laptop
based on a 17 z80 CPU design. One CPU to manage keyboard and screen,
one to run a server, and the others to run user processes. The
screen is configured to be a 160x50 character display, which can
be multiplexed to show up to four 80x25 windows at once, each window
associated one of those other processors.

http://www.chrisfenton.com/the-zedripper-part-1/

It definitely pushes the limits of z80 design, but it's not as far as
that could go as the designer notes in his blog post.

Elijah
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text windows are more GUIish than mere Altair 8800 status LEDs

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