this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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Technology

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (4 children)

Boy... I wonder how old this author is.

They wrote 7MB is impressively small, but they also wrote that it was in 1984. And I guess 7MB in 1984 is likely big... I've heard of computers in the 80s with kilobytes of RAM.

Especially if it's 7MB source code after compressing it into zip.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago

IBM released a 10MB HDD for the PC in 1983.

The most common storage format in 1984 was the 5¼ inch floppy disk which had a capacity of 360KB, though they had introduced a 1.2MB one in 1984.

7MB was huge in 1984

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago

My first boss told me about his first computer. The entry level model was 4KB of RAM. The upgraded model had 8KB. The salesman looked my boss dead in the eye and said “you’re never going to need 8KB!”

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago

I dont think I owned a computer with more than 2MB RAM until the mid 90s.
in 1983 16kb would have been pretty normal. The Apple Lisa was released in 1983 with 1MB RAM and cost $10k.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

Makes one wonder how big the resulting binaries are after compilation.