GET LAMP is here

[Alexey Toptygin]

On Wed, 11 Aug 2010, Fred Cisin wrote:

>> Building a machine that runs a graphical browser using only stock chips
>> doesnt sound totally tivial/.
>
> Surely a graphical browser, (if NOT done in a High Level Language) could
> be written to run on a 5150 with CGA.

I don't know about that... Google is not what I'd call a 
graphics-intensive site, but a single page of results is 64k html, and 
about as much again in images. You can eat up 640k real fast that way, and 
that doesn't include any of the code you need for a TCP/IP stack, stub DNS 
resolver, parsing HTML (and let's not forget the memory cost of 
intermediate representations, unless you want to pay for a full reparse 
every time there's an exposure event) applying CSS, layout, rendering any 
number of image formats, input handling, forms, cookies... Let's not even 
think about supporting ECMA script, without which you won't be able to use 
any web 2.0 sites, and I shudder to think of what you'd have to do to try 
to run flash on an on-topic machine.

I've got 2 text-mostly pages open ATM, and Firefox has an RSS of 100M; 
even if that's 90% wasted (which I very much doubt) then you still need 
10M to hold the useful bits (not counting the filesystem and IP stack bits 
that live in the kernel and aren't counted against Firefox's RSS).

 			Alexey