<html><head><style> body {height: 100%; color:#000000; font-size:12pt; font-family:Times New Roman;}</style></head><body>Is this just a sneaky way of identifying the old fogies here?<br><br>The first computer I got to lay hands on was an Apple II (48K RAM, 1MHz 6502 processor, monochrome green monitor). Several years later, when they first announced an external hard drive option, I remember wondering what in the world anyone would need 20 MB of hard drive space for...<br><br>----- Original Message -----<br>From: Todd Walton <tdwalton@gmail.com><br>To: Central Iowa Linux Users Group <cialug@cialug.org><br>Sent: Thu, 29 Jul 2010 10:47:55 -0500 (CDT)<br>Subject: [Cialug] I Remember When Computer Specs<br><br>I saw a person's Outlook cache file the other day that was 19GB large.<br> A friend pointed out to me that his first computer (he's a youngin')<br>had no more than 4GB of hard drive space total.<br><br>You know how people compare memory and hard drive space like that?<br>They scratch the salt on their shoulder and say <mock deep="" voice=""> 'I<br>remember when computers only came with 500 MB of RAM.' Well, it seems<br>to me like that can only go so far back. There was a certain point<br>(the mid 80s?) where there started to emerge a PC standard, in the<br>form of the "IBM PC compatible". I'm a latecomer to this scene, so<br>correct me if I'm wrong, but before that time computers were largely<br>packaged as complete products where you got what you got, and there<br>were several different types.<br><br>Comparing the amount of RAM in a Commodore 64 to a modern PC doesn't<br>make sense. The Commodore 64 or others didn't have the same<br>architecture, they didn't use RAM in the same way. Obviously it's<br>amazing that we can package several gigs of memory into a single stick<br>of silicon these days and it's actually affordable. That's clearly<br>better than we could do in 1985. But there's something not quite<br>right about comparing them as if there's some linear scale they both<br>exist on.<br><br>--<br>Todd<br>_______________________________________________<br>Cialug mailing list<br>Cialug@cialug.org<br>http://cialug.org/mailman/listinfo/cialug<br><br></mock></cialug@cialug.org></tdwalton@gmail.com></body></html>