OpenBSD Journal

Since your first computer, your workstation now has this times as much memory:

Contributed by jj on from the moore-memory dept.

10 6.7% (71 votes)


100 11.9% (127 votes)


1,000 25.0% (266 votes)


10,000 18.3% (195 votes)


100,000 12.1% (129 votes)


1,000,000 10.2% (109 votes)


10,000,000 3.8% (40 votes)


100,000,000 3.1% (33 votes)


1,000,000,000 3.3% (35 votes)


10,000,000,000 5.5% (59 votes)


Total votes: 1064

(Comments are closed)

Comments

  1. By Me (202.7.166.164) on

    4294967296 / 16384 = 262144 so I can't really fill out your poll. Not enough options even close to the right ratios!

    Comments

    1. By old timer (149.254.200.220) on

      > 4294967296 / 16384 = 262144 so I can't really fill out your poll. Not enough options even close to the right ratios!

      meh, same ratio here though I started with 1k (ZX81) and now have whopping 256Mb (800Mhz P3 laptop). I guess I could upgrade but then I already did double the RAM a couple of years ago and find it plenty..

    2. By Sean Comeau (207.230.254.106) on http://seancomeau.com/

      > 4294967296 / 16384 = 262144 so I can't really fill out your poll. Not enough options even close to the right ratios!

      First box: 2MB, current box: 16384MB

      That's getting close to 10 thousand times more.

  2. By Paul 'WEiRD' de Weerd (84.75.111.32) weerd@weirdnet.nl on http://www.weirdnet.nl/

    My First machine was a Commodore PET 2001, the original model (which had either 4 or 8KB of 8 bit RAM). My current machine has 8GB. That's exactly a 1M fold increase.

    Processor speed went from 1MHz to 6GHz (counting both cores separately), showing only a 6K fold increase.

    Disk size, on the other hand, went from 0 bytes of storage in the PET to 1TB in my current machine. Infinite growth ! ;)

  3. By Anonymous Coward (76.250.126.209) on

    I had an aquarius with 2k; not as fancy as this one:
    http://oldcomputers.net/aquarius.html

    an a zx spectrum 16k

  4. By 3todd (69.219.224.67) on

    8K Atari 800 -> 4GB Dell

  5. By Mike Erdely (merdely) mike@erdelynet.com on http://erdelynet.com/

    5KB Commodore Vic 20 -> 2GB Thinkpad T42

    Comments

    1. By sthen (85.158.45.32) on

      > 5KB Commodore Vic 20 -> 2GB Thinkpad T42

      Since your first computer, your xterm now has this many times the number of columns: 

      ( ) 0.25x
( ) 0.5x
( ) 1x
( ) 2.5x
( ) 5x
(x) 7.5x
( ) 10x
( ) It just had lamps you insensitive clod

      Comments

      1. By Mike Erdely (merdely) on http://erdelynet.com/

        > > 5KB Commodore Vic 20 - 2GB Thinkpad T42
        >
        > Since your first computer, your xterm now has this many times the number of columns:
        >
        > ( ) 0.25x
        > ( ) 0.5x
        > ( ) 1x
        > ( ) 2.5x
        > ( ) 5x
        > (x) 7.5x
        > ( ) 10x
        > ( ) It just had lamps you insensitive clod

        lol... 6x here.

  6. By Magnus Holmberg (mho) undeadly@mho.nu on

    Voted 100000, but it's exactly 65536 times as much...
    (C-64 -> Athlon BE-2400 with 4GB DDR2 ECC)

    - mho

    Comments

    1. By Magnus Holmberg (mho) on

      > Voted 100000, but it's exactly 65536 times as much...
      > (C-64 -> Athlon BE-2400 with 4GB DDR2 ECC)

      (Does this mean my memory is now square? :-))

      - mho

  7. By Anonymous Coward (216.68.198.1) on

    First computer I had was the Adam. Tape machine, time around 1983? Damn thing died soon! Got a original macintosh, 128K ram, few years later upgraded it to 512K for ~$1000, GRR. Still have the mac and the old original Microsoft Basic programming book and disc, book was very well done.

    As to the other who had a commodore PET, I use to type sys1000, could make the bell ring constantly and other wierd carshes with differnt # that I have forgotten. We use to use a simple time loop before computer class, people came in, bell was stuck on, and some didn't know how to escape it. Was funny! Primative hacks back then.

    I currently use an old 1999 450MHZ laptop with only 256M ram, works well on OpenBSD. X runs, but I only use lynx. Old laptops have the best keyboards, and a big square type screen, not the short wide screen crap of today. I can get 6 hours on the dual battery option, although only down to 1 good battery now, 3 hours tops, isn't too bad.

  8. By Brad (216.138.195.228) brad at comstyle dot com on

    From a Commodore 64 with 64KB to a T43 laptop at the moment with 1GB of RAM.

  9. By Marc Espie (213.41.185.88) espie@openbsd.org on

    Sharp PC 1211 (1K) -> Acorn Atom (12K ?) -> commodore 64 (64K) -> commodore 128 (128K) -> amiga 500 (1M) -> amiga 3000 (4M ?) -> toshiba laptop (32M) -> ... -> current thinkpad (2G)


    Of course my first exposure to computers was before that (Texas Instruments TI 57), but I don't know how the instructions were encoded. 50 instructions + 8 registers + stack. Now, how much memory was in there ?

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (213.84.21.112) on

      > Sharp PC 1211 (1K) -> Acorn Atom (12K ?) -> commodore 64 (64K) -> commodore 128 (128K) -> amiga 500 (1M) -> amiga 3000 (4M ?) -> toshiba laptop (32M) -> ... -> current thinkpad (2G)
      >
      >
      > Of course my first exposure to computers was before that (Texas Instruments TI 57), but I don't know how the instructions were encoded. 50 instructions + 8 registers + stack. Now, how much memory was in there ?

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-57

      I presume 64-128 byte, let's say 100?


      I had an HP-41CV

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-41

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-41_Extension_Module

      ± 400-2000 bytes.

      Now 2GB, so 1.000.000 times as much...

  10. By Ray Lai (210.22.83.146) ray@cyth.net on http://cyth.net/~ray/

    468DX2 66MHz with 8 or 16 megs of RAM. My current laptop has 1.5 gigs of RAM, my work desktop has 2 gigs.

    Am I the only one whose first computer had RAM in megabytes?

    Comments

    1. By Dan Barowy (38.113.22.50) on

      Wow, you just reminded me that my first laptop had exactly those specs. A ThinkPad 365CD I bought secondhand in college. Great machine. Come to think of it, it's also the very first machine I installed BSD on. Everything worked right out of the box. I had to replace the hard disk at one point, but the form factor had changed to the standard height we have now-- I remember wrapping stacks of pennies in electrical tape to shim the disk up to the right height. Awesome keyboard on that thing.

  11. By al (78.36.194.31) on

    ZX Spectrum from 128kBytes -> 1.5 GBytes, about 10 000 ratio.

    Comments

    1. By shef (78.37.241.242) on

      > ZX Spectrum from 128kBytes -> 1.5 GBytes, about 10 000 ratio.

      I was the owner of ZX Spectrum 48K.

  12. By Anonymous Coward (69.226.226.63) on

    First comp was a commodore 64 w/64k RAM
    Current machine has 4 gigs, roughly 65,000 times, so I voted 100,000 as that's the closest magnitude.

  13. By Anonymous Coward (151.136.100.2) on

    quite moronic to use decimal multipliers here...
    i mean 2^34 / 2^16 is not and integral power of 10...

    Comments

    1. By Miod Vallat (miod) on

      > quite moronic to use decimal multipliers here...
      > i mean 2^34 / 2^16 is not and integral power of 10...

      C'm'on, it's obvious those numbers were hex.

      Comments

      1. By Janne Johansson (jj) on Old amiga fart.

        > > quite moronic to use decimal multipliers here...
        > > i mean 2^34 / 2^16 is not and integral power of 10...
        >
        > C'm'on, it's obvious those numbers were hex.

        Then again, we know you want an entry for "less than 10". ;)

        Comments

        1. By Anonymous Coward (88.217.158.50) on

          > > > quite moronic to use decimal multipliers here...
          > > > i mean 2^34 / 2^16 is not and integral power of 10...
          > >
          > > C'm'on, it's obvious those numbers were hex.
          >
          > Then again, we know you want an entry for "less than 10". ;)

          less than 10 is only 1...

          Comments

          1. By Miod Vallat (miod) on

            > > > > quite moronic to use decimal multipliers here...
            > > > > i mean 2^34 / 2^16 is not and integral power of 10...
            > > >
            > > > C'm'on, it's obvious those numbers were hex.
            > >
            > > Then again, we know you want an entry for "less than 10". ;)
            >
            > less than 10 is only 1...

            Only in binary.

            Comments

            1. By Anonymous Coward (88.217.158.50) on

              > > less than 10 is only 1...
              >
              > Only in binary.

              ok. in trinary there is also 2.

              Comments

              1. By Anonymous Coward (212.12.58.126) on

                > > > less than 10 is only 1...
                > >
                > > Only in binary.
                >
                > ok. in trinary there is also 2.

                which, as we all now, is only a placeholder for very large values of 1

                Comments

                1. By Anonymous Coward (151.136.100.2) on

                  > > > > less than 10 is only 1...
                  > > >
                  > > > Only in binary.
                  > >
                  > > ok. in trinary there is also 2.
                  >
                  > which, as we all now, is only a placeholder for very large values of 1

                  well. in war times it may even reach values of four

      2. By Anonymous Coward (88.217.158.50) on

        > C'm'on, it's obvious those numbers were hex.

        not obvious at all -- hex has commas every 4 zeros and not 3!
        it could've been binary with octal-placed commas though perhaps...
        but would also start with a zero!

  14. By Anonymous Coward (38.113.22.50) on

    If you don't count video RAM, my first machine (TI-99/4A) only had 256 bytes available-- a limit that I never once hit (at least that I know of). So I have about 8 million times that now.

  15. By Terrell Prude' Jr. (151.188.18.42) tprude@cmosnetworks.com (this is a spamtrap address) on http://www.cmosnetworks.com/

    The first computer I ever had at home was the IBM PC (yep, model 5150), with two floppy drives and 128KB DRAM. It ran PC-DOS 2.0 and finally was retired in 1991, when I bought my 80386-33.

    Now, my fastest computer is a dual Athlon MP box with 3.5GB DRAM. The next most powerful one is a Power Mac G4 (dual 1.3GHz CPU's, 2GB DRAM). It, too, is quite fast. And yes, both of these, as with all of my computers, run Free Software. It's currently a mixture of GNU/Linux, OpenBSD, and ReactOS.

    But I have to say that the hardware improvement that I appreciate most is the display technology, especially the LCD screen. Those are such an improvement over the original IBM CGA displays that it's not even comparable. The difference is astounding.

    --TP
    --Microsoft-Free Since 2003!

    Comments

    1. By Martin Hein (80.243.113.8) on

      > --Microsoft-Free Since 2003!

      Since 1993!

      Just realizing im getting old.

      First machine was a 6501 CPU with 1/2Kb RAM, 6*7 segment led display and a HEX keyboard. My father built it. After some experimentation it was used to control the heating of the home.

      Later it was replaced with a VAX 780/11. But other people owned that one.

      /Martin

  16. By cdp_xe (217.94.205.218) on http://doomed-reality.org

    just to add the "amiga comment":

    Commodore Amiga 500: 512 kByte (7.14 MHz) -> 1 gb ram (1.8 ghz) = 2048.

    But I used to programm a 8051 microcontroller at work with 16 kbytes of ram (afair). this gives us:

    1024M / 16 k = 65.536. har! now I can click '10.000'.

  17. By Steffen Wendzel (217.94.205.218) on http://doomed-reality.org

    Aeehmm... who the hell can click '10,000,000,000'???

    say one has NOW a 4 Terra Byte large super cool monster machine what are 4.398.046.511.104 Bytes. If you div it trough 10,000,000,000 you get only 439 bytes. But amazing 6.1% of all asked people clicked it???

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (70.169.167.212) on

      > Aeehmm... who the hell can click '10,000,000,000'???

      Any MCSE, of course! :-)

      >
      > say one has NOW a 4 Terra Byte large super cool monster machine what are 4.398.046.511.104 Bytes. If you div it trough 10,000,000,000 you get only 439 bytes. But amazing 6.1% of all asked people clicked it???
      >

      Now, now...you're making sense, that is expressly against regulations! :-D

      Probably some of the old-timers who worked on systems with 512 bytes of DRAM might be able to click it. However, that's still kinda pushing it, since then they'd need 4 TB of DRAM today! Hmm...maybe old-timers at Lawrence Livermore Nat'l Laboratory in California, USA, then...I understand they've been dealing with 1000-CPU clusters and terabytes of data for a while.

      Oh, and of course that comprises 6.1% of OpenBSD users! :-D

      Comments

      1. By Miod Vallat (miod) on

        One more proof these are octal numbers!

  18. By Anonymous Coward (24.161.244.118) on

    My first machine (well, my family's) was an Osborne II with 64 KB of RAM, two 5.25-inch floppy drives, a 4.77 MHz Z80 and a tiny little CRT all crammed into a suitcase-looking shell with the keyboard as the top cover. It ran CP/M 2.2 and could be programmed in BASIC and assembly, and was simple enough that you could understand every part of it. A lot of things have changed since those innocent times.

  19. By Blake (62.4.77.94) on

    256k Tandy -> 4GB Mac

  20. By Allan (24.68.59.30) on

    4KB TRS-80 at high school, borrowed a 1KB SC/MP homebrew and learned to fat finger at home. The SC/MP had 8 x 1Kbit SRAM memory chips, at several dollars each. Current workstation has 2GB, began shopping for another 4GB last week.

    Back in that era, with no hardware multiply support, it was easily many hundreds of clock cycles to compute a single precision floating point multiply or divide. I estimate that old TRS-80 at about 10 KFLOPS. Cell achieves something close to 250 GFLOPS. Clock frequency might not have changed by a factor of 1,000,000 but if you look at it more closely, in many instances performance has scaled as much as memory has.

    IIRC I had the data sheets for an 8008 circa 1975 for an 8008 with a price of CDN$295. It seemed quite daunting to me in junior high, with the requirement for three power supplies and multiple clock phases, back when you were more than likely to kill a CMOS device by touching it without a ground strap. It was a long three years before I actually touched my first microcomputer. The complexities of too little have since given way to the complexities of too much.

  21. By Josh Grosse (josh) josh@jggimi.homeip.net on

    8K -> 1G = 1:125000

  22. By Anonymous Coward (71.255.109.79) on

    The first digital computer I ever had was a wooden abacus from playskool or something like that, with big brightly colored beads.

    Memory in abaci can't really be expressed in bytes, since it stores data in base one. The highest number you could figure with it (using all the memory) was about 60 or so. My current machine can store the number 255 549,755,813,888 times, less space for the operating system (which I never used to have to worry about).

Latest Articles

Credits

Copyright © - Daniel Hartmeier. All rights reserved. Articles and comments are copyright their respective authors, submission implies license to publish on this web site. Contents of the archive prior to as well as images and HTML templates were copied from the fabulous original deadly.org with Jose's and Jim's kind permission. This journal runs as CGI with httpd(8) on OpenBSD, the source code is BSD licensed. undeadly \Un*dead"ly\, a. Not subject to death; immortal. [Obs.]