Derive could do a lot of the symbolic math that Macsyma does as a single 5 1/4" floppy (360K?) DOS app in 1988. Awkward interface but useful for grad. physics.

Yes. Yes I do.

I've been following Chuck Moore's new startup GreenArrays and their progress with much interest. I hope they can announce some major design wins soon.

Back around 1991 I had a PC-clone 386SX. For you youngsters, thats a 32-bit CPU with a 16-bit (i.e. slow) data bus. I didn't have the coin to put Windows/386 or Windows 3.0 on it, but I could afford GeoWorks. It worked very well on that old machine. I kept using it after I moved on to a used 486. GeoWorks word processor was quite good for it's time. I was sad it never got much market share.

IIRC, a .com had to have code to fit entirely in a 64Kb memory segment, and had a fixed default memory map for the code, stack and data segments. This means the loader did not need to do any fancy relocation, so there were no relocation tables and a much simpler executable header structure (nearly(?) absent for a .com).

Just after submitting my story, I saw another already on the main page. Not surprised, but frustrating because my Internet connection was baulky this morning. Anyway, I'm just glad this event is getting good visibility one way or another!
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mlosh