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On 7/8/2011 23:15, Warp wrote:
> One argument that some of the moon hoax theorists say is that all the
> technology in the lunar module can fit in a cellphone.
All the computronium would certainly fit. The computers back then sucked.
I was thinking about it, and I realized the giant mainframe I learned to
program on had 512K of memory to run the entire college, both administrative
and teaching. Back then I never really thought of it - you had the memory
you had and if something didn't fit you made it smaller.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
"Coding without comments is like
driving without turn signals."
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Darren New <dne### [at] san rrcom> wrote:
> I was thinking about it, and I realized the giant mainframe I learned to
> program on had 512K of memory to run the entire college, both administrative
> and teaching. Back then I never really thought of it - you had the memory
> you had and if something didn't fit you made it smaller.
I still remember the time when 4 MB in a PC was a pretty decent amount
of RAM (and more expensive than 4 GB or RAM today). The notion of having
1 GB of RAM seemed completely unthinkable back then (there were no RAM
chips even *nearly* that big, no PC motherboards that would have supported
that much RAM with RAM chips of the time, and even if there had been, such
a motherboard would have costed a fortune, and the RAM itself would have
probably costed as much as 100 entire top-of-the-line PCs.) Today 2 GB of
RAM is a typical minimum configuration, and a chip of that size has become
ridiculously cheap (haven't checked, but probably less than half of what
4 MB of RAM costed in the 90's).
OTOH games (which is usually the only reason you need that much RAM) look
slightly better than they did in the 90's, so it's warranted.
--
- Warp
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On 10/07/2011 06:55 AM, Warp wrote:
> I still remember the time when 4 MB in a PC was a pretty decent amount
> of RAM (and more expensive than 4 GB or RAM today). The notion of having
> 1 GB of RAM seemed completely unthinkable back then
I'm sitting a few feet away from an Amiga 1200, sold for approximately
advertised as providing "2048 K of RAM". Which, considering the
Commodore 64 we bought it to replace, seemed like one hell of a step up! o_O
(On the other hand, *my* A1200 has been upgraded to 34 MB RAM. At
considerable cost, I might add. I also installed a 850MB HD, which
probability similarly expensive. I still rememer the awe when I realised
that with 34 MB of RAM, I could actually edit an entire 2-minute CD
track *in RAM*!)
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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On 10/07/2011 6:55 AM, Warp wrote:
> I still remember the time when 4 MB in a PC was a pretty decent amount
> of RAM (and more expensive than 4 GB or RAM today).
And I remember when you had to add an additional 384k to the 640k
conventional memory to make it 1 meg. Now my laptop has 8 Gig
--
Regards
Stephen
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On 09/07/2011 04:25 PM, Darren New wrote:
> I was thinking about it, and I realized the giant mainframe I learned to
> program on had 512K of memory to run the entire college, both
> administrative and teaching. Back then I never really thought of it -
> you had the memory you had and if something didn't fit you made it smaller.
I wonder how many octets you can fit on one side of A4 paper? You could
probably *print out* 512KB and not use all that many trees...
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On 7/11/2011 1:56, Invisible wrote:
> I wonder how many octets you can fit on one side of A4 paper? You could
> probably *print out* 512KB and not use all that many trees...
The source code to the OS was a shoebox full of microfiche.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
"Coding without comments is like
driving without turn signals."
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> On 10/07/2011 6:55 AM, Warp wrote:
>> I still remember the time when 4 MB in a PC was a pretty decent amount
>> of RAM (and more expensive than 4 GB or RAM today).
>
> And I remember when you had to add an additional 384k to the 640k
> conventional memory to make it 1 meg. Now my laptop has 8 Gig
>
I remember when having 48K of RAM was huge. I also remember an ad for a
5Mb hard drive for $5000. It's size: 18.5" x 8" x 4.25". It had it's own
power supply.
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Alain <aze### [at] qwertyorg> wrote:
> I remember when having 48K of RAM was huge. I also remember an ad for a
> 5Mb hard drive for $5000. It's size: 18.5" x 8" x 4.25". It had it's own
> power supply.
I don't remember it, but I have been told that such hard drives used to
be the size of a fridge at some point. (And probably more expensive than
a car.)
--
- Warp
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On 12/07/2011 07:17 AM, Warp wrote:
> I don't remember it, but I have been told that such hard drives used to
> be the size of a fridge at some point. (And probably more expensive than
> a car.)
I don't know about hard drives, but the old drum memories used to be
huge, so I'm told. As you say, about the size of a fridge.
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On 7/11/2011 23:17, Warp wrote:
> I don't remember it, but I have been told that such hard drives used to
> be the size of a fridge at some point. (And probably more expensive than
> a car.)
Drums were very big, as Andrew said.
Disk drives when I started were about 80cm wide, a meter or more deep, and
about chest high. The disks themselves were maybe half a meter diameter, a
third of a meter tall, had six platters (and top and bottom of course) and
were heavy enough they were inconvenient to carry with one hand, altho you
could lift them. Oh, and they held four meg. (We had two drives, a CPU, a
printer, and one other thing I forget what it was, and each cabinet was
about that big, except the printer was somewhat bigger because it had to
hold the 132 paper and all, and the CPU had the card reader and keyboard on
it as well as the front panel switches.)
Drives for a CP/M machine that could hold 8 meg were the size a color laser
printer is today.
When the high school finally replaced the old NCR-50 mainframe (such as it
was) with a PR1ME, the disk drive was in a cabinet literally as big as a
fridge. However, if you opened it up, the cabinet was empty but for some
wiring and a disk drive maybe 10cm high. The head of the department couldn't
stop laughing for about 20 minutes.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
"Coding without comments is like
driving without turn signals."
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