[Cialug] I Remember When Computer Specs

[murraymckee at wellsfargo.com]

One of the programs I was assigned to maintain early in my career had a comment in the front.  Requires 64K of main memory - will not run in 32 K.  This was an IBM 370 mainframe program, although the program hasn't been updated since the 360 era.  I just checked and that program is still in use and it hasn't been updated in 25 years.  The comment is still there too.

My first linear storage was punch tape.

Murray McKee
Operating Systems Engineer
WFFIS - Wells Fargo Financial Information Systems
800 Walnut Street
MAC F4030-037
Des Moines, IA 50309-3605
WORK (515)557-6127 Cell (515) 343-6630  FAX (515) 557-6046
MurrayMcKee at WellsFargo.com
"This message may contain confidential and / or privileged information.  If you are not the addressee or authorized to receive this for the addressee, you must not use, copy, disclose, or take any action based on this message or any information herein.  If you have received this message in error, please advise the sender immediately by reply e-mail and delete this message.  Thank you for your cooperation."

From: cialug-bounces at cialug.org [mailto:cialug-bounces at cialug.org] On Behalf Of Matthew Nuzum
Sent: Thursday, July 29, 2010 11:31 AM
To: Central Iowa Linux Users Group
Subject: Re: [Cialug] I Remember When Computer Specs

On Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 10:47 AM, Todd Walton <tdwalton at gmail.com<mailto: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<http://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/20100729/53935ffb/attachment-0001.htm