[Cialug] I Remember When Computer Specs

[Matthew Nuzum]

On Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 10:47 AM, Todd Walton <tdwalton at gmail.com> wrote:

> I saw a person's Outlook cache file the other day that was 19GB large.
>  A friend pointed out to me that his first computer (he's a youngin')
> had no more than 4GB of hard drive space total.
>
> You know how people compare memory and hard drive space like that?
> They scratch the salt on their shoulder and say <mock deep voice> 'I
> remember when computers only came with 500 MB of RAM.'  Well, it seems
> to me like that can only go so far back.  There was a certain point
> (the mid 80s?) where there started to emerge a PC standard, in the
> form of the "IBM PC compatible".  I'm a latecomer to this scene, so
> correct me if I'm wrong, but before that time computers were largely
> packaged as complete products where you got what you got, and there
> were several different types.
>
> Comparing the amount of RAM in a Commodore 64 to a modern PC doesn't
> make sense.  The Commodore 64 or others didn't have the same
> architecture, they didn't use RAM in the same way.  Obviously it's
> amazing that we can package several gigs of memory into a single stick
> of silicon these days and it's actually affordable.  That's clearly
> better than we could do in 1985.  But there's something not quite
> right about comparing them as if there's some linear scale they both
> exist on.
>
>
There are a few important considerations in here.

1. User productivity - presumably, more powerful computers with more
resources allow computers to do things automatically that make end users
more productive. For example, squigly underlines telling you of spelling
errors as you type replacing a manual "check spelling" button and a dialog
showing each error separately

2. Developer productivity - early computer software required very careful
resource planning. From the amount of RAM used to the number of floppy disks
required to ship it. Modern computers resources are ample enough that
developers don't have to think about this too much enabling them to bring
software to market more quickly.

I'm certain older non pc hardware had serious constraints that users thought
about. The old emacs joke says that emacs stands for "eight megs (of ram in
my computer) and constantly swapping" implying that a machine with a
whopping 8 MB of RAM was not enough to get good performance out of emacs.
And you should see the hurdles people jumped in order to accommodate linear
access storage mediums. (yes, I am old enough to have had a computer with a
tape drive as the main storage, but I was only about 8 at the time)

-- 
Matthew Nuzum
newz2000 on freenode, skype, linkedin, identi.ca and twitter

"Never stop learning" –Robert Nuzum (My dad)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://cialug.org/pipermail/cialug/attachments/20100729/f964a290/attachment.htm