Thanks For The Memories
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No, this isn’t going to be a Bob Hope tribute. I was just struck recently by the state of technology now compared to when I was a kid. You see, we recently got a digital camcorder and along with it we got one of those 4 gigabyte SDHC memory cards.
Thats when it hit me. That “card” is only a little bit bigger than a postage stamp… and it’s got four gigabytes of storage capacity! I remember the first computer I ever used (not owned, that came much later), it was the old TRS-80 Model 1. That puppy had a whopping four Kilobytes of memory that I believe was in the form of four 1 kilobyte memory chips, each of which were about the same size as the SDHC card.
Now for a bit of computer maths so the uninformed can get an idea of how much storage this is:
A “bit” is a single 1 or zero value. A “byte” is made up of 8 bits. One character of ASCII text uses one byte of memory. A “kilobyte” is 1024 bytes, a “Megabyte” is 1024 kilobytes. A “gigabyte” is 1024 megabytes.
So the old machine with 4 kilobytes of memory had 4096 bytes of memory… for the whole computer! That held the operating system, basic interpreter, video memory and basic program code (which was normally typed in and saved on audio cassette tapes)
Now look at the SDHC card in the camcorder. It’s a 4 gigabyte card, which is 1,048,576 times as much memory as that old TRS-80.
Oh, somebody could have built a four gigabyte memory circuit back then, of course it would have filled a four car garage, used unthinkable amounts of electricity and required monstrous amounts of air conditioning to keep it from overheating. Not to mention the fact that there wasn’t a single processor in existence at the time that could address more than 64 kilobytes of memory.
I remember back in those days that if you wrote a program you optimized it to make the most efficient use of memory you could. Not only did it run faster that way, but it used less memory. Now of course memory is amazingly cheap by comparison. Now hardly anybody bothers to optimize a program’s use of memory which means that not only are modern programs unbelievably monstrous, sometimes they even run slower than some of their older counterparts.
Technorati Tags: efficiency, waste, memory, nostalgia
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