[rescue] $35 50gig drives

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Wed, 04 May 2005 @ 16:09 -0400, Phil Stracchino said:

> I was just pondering the other day, for instance, that my CPU has more
> RAM in its L1 cache than the mainframe computers I worked on in 1978
> possessed in total, and that there's more memory on my graphics card
> than it was possible to install in the new, bleeding-edge PC I built in
> 1993 or so, and that was once super-high resolution (1024x768, with a
> full 8 bits of color, non-interlaced even) now feels poky and cramped
> enough to make me wonder how I ever got any work done at such a crappy
> low resolution.  Just can't display enough information on the screen at
> once...

Same here.

I remember when 50 of us shared a Prime 9955, and it had about 512K of
RAM total.

Timesharing systems are, IMHO, really good for learning.  For one thing,
there is a kind of community around those machines that doesn't exist
now.  It also taught us to be frugal with our shared resources.

Now there is little incentive for students to make their code better,
because they have so much brute force power, it is difficult for them to
see when they are being inefficient.

On a 20MHz 68020, or a minicomputer with 50 other users, you learn when
things are going wrong very quickly.

If you don't notice yourself, someone else will be sure and point it out
to you.

When I was doing IBM mainframe programming in the late 80s, our biggest
machine was a 4381, miles away in Richmond, VA.  Our drive volume had a
whopping 256MB of space, which just blew my mind.  I think it had about
32MB of memory, which again, blew my mind.  


-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- [javalin: an unwieldy programming weapon used
to stab a software project through the heart until dead]