OT: Hard drives

It seems to use ajax in a way which assumes it can use all the CPU you have. I run it in a separate browser instance, which is limited to using a small amount of CPU, so it doesn't interfere with anything else.

I bought a 486 system in 1991 which initially ran Interactive UNIX, and later Solaris. I tried SLS Linux (Soft Landing System) briefly, probably in 1992. That system started with 4MB, but went to 8MB and then 20MB, before being retired around 1996.

It was brought out of retirement in the early 2000's when BT started rolling out business broadband, as my employer at the time required that we ran a logging firewall on separate dedicated hardware, and it performed that role until 2005 when I left that employer. It was upgraded to 32MB (the motherboard's max) and Solaris 7 for this task. It's back in retirement in the attic now, and I should really chuck it out.

Generally speaking, interactive windowing systems and GUI apps tend to grow bloatware until they get just too slow for current generation hardware, so their look and feel performance-wise remains constant over the long period as hardware gets faster. This isn't true for non- interactive apps (e.g. those more commonly used on servers), which do genuinely speed up with the hardware.