This is a little funny for the computer geeks

[draggar]

There has been a very long email conversation I've had with myself, my supervisor, and a customer service supervisor over upgrading many computers' RAM.

The service supervisor always says that some have 512KB member, no matter how many times my supervisor and I have responded stating (not in a correcting way but in a spec way) 512MB.

She does have the 1GB and 2 GB correct, though.

[prb]

640K Ought to Be Enough for Everybody

[SteeleDragon78]

perhaps she is relapsing into the days of a 512k burst cache? other than that dunno

and i still say that 64k is more than enough for a general user

[BroSCFischer]

and i still say that 64k is more than enough for a general user

The first computer I ever owned (was given to me by an employer who was cleaning out his back room) was a TRS-80 Model 4 (I wish I still had it, I loved that thing )

It had 128K memory.

SC

[Geek King]

The first computer I ever owned (was given to me by an employer who was cleaning out his back room) was a TRS-80 Model 4 (I wish I still had it, I loved that thing )

It had 128K memory.

I wrote my first BASIC program on one of those! We had the little tape drive that used real cassette tapes for storage, too.

[Chromatix]

I still have an expanded BBC Micro. It has a very interesting memory map:

- 32KB RAM, permanently mapped into the bottom half of the address space.

- 16KB OS ROM and I/O mapping, permanently mapped into the top quarter.

- 32KB RAM and 128KB ROMs, paged on the remaining quarter. Most of these are on the expansion board.

The paged RAM could also be used to remap the video memory (which could take up to 20KB) out of the main memory map and thus free up a lot of space.

With a 2MHz 6502 and hardware scrolling, that was a powerful machine in it's time.

[DevilBoy]

"You see, I come from a time in the nineteen-hundred-and-seventies when computers were used for two things - to either go to the moon, or play Pong... nothing in between. Y'see, you didn't need a fancy operating system to play Pong, and the men who went to the moon--God Bless 'em--did it with no mouse, and a plain text-only black-and-white screen, and 32 kilobytes of RAM.

But then 'round 'bout the late 70's, home computers started to do a little more than play Pong... very little more. Like computers started to play games, and balance checkbooks, and why you could play Zaxxon on your Apple II, or... write a book! All with a computer that had 32 kilobytes of RAM! It was good enough to go to the moon, it was good enough for you.

It was a golden time. A time before Windows, a time before mouses, a time before the internet and bloatware, and a time... before every OS sucked."

[Geek King]

It was a golden time. A time before Windows, a time before mouses, a time before the internet and bloatware, and a time... before every OS sucked."

I would point out the old philosophy nugget: If there were no sadness, would you know if you were happy?

It was not a golden time. We just didn't have anything to compare it to. Those were also the days when if a friend got a job halfway accross the country, your friendship was basically over because there was no good way to keep in contact. Now you can e-mail within five minutes, chat online, or go slaughter dragons online together. And trust me, those early OS sucked too. Ask any early programmer about their limits, and you'll learn some facinating new language.

[DevilBoy]

I would point out the old philosophy nugget: If there were no sadness, would you know if you were happy?

It's a song by Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie.

It's satiric humor. It's not meant to be a statement that waxes on the philosophic.

[Geek King]

It's satiric humor. It's not meant to be a statement that waxes on the philosophic.

Ah. Didn't catch the reference. Apologies offered. As you were.

[crazylegs]

and why you could play Zaxxon on your Apple II, or... <snip>, a time before mouses,

Uh, my Apple IIc had a mouse. It also had a joystick. You could only however have one plugged in at a time and you needed a screwdriver to change them! Good times!

[prb]

I have a Tandy 1000, haven't turned it on in a while. SOOO temped to take it to Best Buy's "Geek Squad" and ask them to put Vista on it

[Tanasi]

The first computer I ever owned (was given to me by an employer who was cleaning out his back room) was a TRS-80 Model 4 (I wish I still had it, I loved that thing )

It had 128K memory.

SC

I still have a TRS-80 Model 1 with a whopping 16K. I later bought a memory expansion unit and up it to 48K with a seriel port, paraelle port, floppy disk port, hard drive port. I have a printer and 2 single side single density 5.25 floppy drives. The thing puts off so much RF you can't watch TV at the same time and so much heat it would goes wonky after a few hours. I think the floppys held 80K and cost nearly $5 each. I had Cobol, Fortran, and Assembly languages for it, a word processor, some utility programs and you had to know all the commands by heart as there was no help except manuals and those cost extra. The cassette drive while slow was very reliable the floppys no so much. I continued to use it up into the mid 80's and bought a PC with a 8086 4.77mhz, 20meg HD, SSDD Floppy, color RGB Monitor, no mouse and very pre-windows.
A lot of folks these days don't have a clue how much easier computers are to operate.

[PepperElf]

640K Ought to Be Enough for Everybody

ROFL

double ROFL.... i soooo wanna see you take that Tandy to BB.
I'm betting they won't know what it is.

[draggar]

I have a Tandy 1000, haven't turned it on in a while. SOOO temped to take it to Best Buy's "Geek Squad" and ask them to put Vista on it

Do it and I would LOVE to be a fly on the wall for that one.