Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard 1645

tries to build a workable kernel for 16-bit x86 processors, using code extracted from the full-blown Linux kernel. The ecological niches that ELKS tries to fit in are the embedded world and the teach-and-learn world (as Minix did-does).

The project seems quite cold but there is still some minor activity on the mailing-list. It has probably come too late: people who use embedded 16-bit machines already have designed their own OS, and do not need a

The GNU guidelines actually promote the use of much memory because it somewhat "guarantees" that the GNU tools will not trespbutt on the intellectual property of previous software (AT&T code and so on), because such software was usually tuned to use little RAM. In a way, the GNU guidelines were promoting bad programming habits for political reasons. It turned out that the GNU project took so long that Moore's law had time to kick in, and "unbadify" the GNU guidelines. The real GNU take off came with Linux, which itself began mostly because Linus Torvalds wanted to use his brand new 32-bit 80386 machine. That is, the GNU guidelines required 32-bit machines with several megabytes of RAM, and the GNU project stepped into the real world when such hardware came into widespread existence.

The transition from 32-bit to 64-bit occurred when Linux was ported to the Alpha platform, and it was really painful at that time. I have used Alpha machines since 1997, and nothing worked cleanly circa 1997. Things became much better around 1999-2000 (the X11 server stopped making unaligned accesses, and some big software projects such as gcc-egcs began to compile and run without specific unofficial patches).

--Thomas lovein