Reply to: Memory prices

[DaveB]

Are they the triangular rubber coins six thousand eight hundred miles along each side?

No, thats the Ningi.

[PerlOfWisdom]

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

Threaded.

Are they the triangular rubber coins six thousand eight hundred miles along each side?

[DimPrawn]

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

Threaded.

[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

[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]

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

[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.

[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

[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.

[DimPrawn]

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

Till then, it's just a pointless hobby.

[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.

[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.

[DaveB]

Back in the late eighties I dabbled in the 2nd had server and components market. Picked up a Dell box that was supposed to be pretty basic. Opened it up to check everything was in order and found 2x512mb SIMMS that I wasnt expecting. Prices on the 2nd hand market back then were around £350 quid each. Result

Surplus memory was always a nice little earner from doing upgrades on business sites as well. 20 pcs going from 64mb to 128mb meant a nice stack of 16 and 32mb SIMMS to be "disposed of"

[AtW]

Running url loading process on 6 CPUs that deduplicates urls found on 5 bln crawled pages - approximately 50 bln urls (long strings) in question I think, once they are deduped against each other I will need to dedup them against existing 22 bln unique ones I have.

And this kind of stuff is child's game for me now - I work on far more advanced concepts that in a couple of centuries will approach the complexity of the stuff threaded has been working on in the middle ages

[DimPrawn]

Oh, so no comments about my implementation of the code that was searching for 1500 times more data than yours? I thought so!

There is no doubt AtW that you are the best person in the world at writing C# code for searching for data in the format you have created that is specific to what you are doing at the moment.

I am the best person in the world at writing in my own handwriting.