Memory prices

[PerlOfWisdom]

I know you are trying to be funny, but what you should consider is that when you deals with objects number of which exceeds billions, or even trillions in some cases it means that if you don't keep them in memory you will have at least a fixed cost of a disk seek - that applies to cases when you can't access data sequentially of course - this means that performance becomes seriosly limited by disk: even if you talk about sequential access it is still good 2 orders of magnitude slower than accessing same data in RAM.

So what you're saying is that 640k is not enough for some jobs?

PS in all the languages in all the countries in all the world, there aren't 100 million words.

 

[AtW]

PS in all the languages in all the countries in all the world, there aren't 100 million words.

Well, how many unique words you think used on the world wide web?

Of course many kindergarden programmers never in their lifes face real tough world-class problems to solve, but someone has to do it.

 

[DimPrawn]

When you make some money out of this, I'll admire you.

Till then, it's just a pointless hobby.

 

[PerlOfWisdom]

Well, how many unique words you think used on the world wide web?

Of course many kindergarden programmers never in their lifes face real tough world-class problems to solve, but someone has to do it.

Depends how you define a "word"



Anyway, I thought you weren't going to disrespect my achievement:-

Ok old chap, I won't be disrespectful to your achievement because I am wiser now,

Edit:
I wish all my "real tough world-class problems" just involved sitting in a warm room clicking a mouse and pressing keys.

 

[AtW]

When you make some money out of this, I'll admire you.

This is what I want to do - it also brings money, so far I have broken even and well on track to exceed my permie wage, in fact I have done so since I can get hardware more tax efficiently than otherwise. More importantly I am becoming a consideraly better programmer, could not care less if I am the best or not, but I want to know that I improve.

Perl - I am not disrespecting your achievement, I am just trying to make it clear that there IS use for more memory: my 8 GB of RAM have just arrived

 

[Joe Black]

Right,

I remember when the 4k upgrade for our PDP-8e cost £1000, and you wouldn't believe how much we spent on paper tape and ribbons for the teletypes ...........

Not that I'm that old, really

Seems you were much more ahead of the game than me hattra. Where I was we were spoilt with one of those new fandangled PDP-11s.

Ah, those were the days, reading the boot code off a torn in half line-print while you flicked the final 16 switches and hit the execute button.

 

[hattra]

I'd forgotten about the load sequence - IIRC you had to load the first 16 or 32 bytes through the front panel, which told it how to load the bootstrap loader (a few hundred bytes on paper tape), which then told it how to load the O/S (also on paper tape). Oh the joy when we finally got an optical paper tape reader and could load the O/S in 2-3 minutes, rather that the 45 minutes it took using the tape reader on a teletype (and which we usually had to do twice a day).

I think I've still got a listing for "Moonlander" that we wrote in Focal

 

[TheMonkey]

Thinking about it, I had something slightly worse a few years ago. I had a desktop calculator (the manufacturer escapes me) which had nixie tubes and no ICs - everything was about 3000-odd transistors inside it on 15 cards.

It didn't work though. Made a nasty burning transformer smell and blew the fuse after about 20 seconds. I would have repaired it if I could have found the schematics.

 

[hattra]

A teacher at my school built his own computer, out of reed switches (it was his PhD project). The only computer I've ever heard that rustled as it worked

 

[DimPrawn]

I remember when each 64TB RAM module for the Intel Million Core processor cost over 4000 Galactic Credits.

Threaded.