On 31/08/2015 10:50, Peter Humphrey wrote: > On Sunday 30 August 2015 18:26:49 Mick wrote: > >> Modern appliances with Green stickers on them (whatever they're called) are >> more efficient by design. To some extent this is also true with PCs. I >> still have an old Pentium 4 32bit running a couple of test environments and >> back up storage. I can assure you that the room gets hot after it has been >> running for a couple of hours! :-) > > The desktop machine I'm referring to (an Amari "workstation") dates from > 2009. > It has an i5 processor, 16GB RAM* and two 2GB SSDs as the main power sinks. > It > sits (runs) in a boxroom 6ft square and keeps it comfortably warm. I haven't > noticed any change in ambient temp since the SSDs replaced spinners. > > * Whoever named that Random Access had a strange understanding of English. > The > last thing I want from memory is random access! How much better it would have > been to call it something like Direct Access. Oh well - much too late now. >
It's random access to distinguish it from serial access. In the early early days there were a lot of strange methods being tried to build memory - like dots on a cathode ray tube! To get to bit you wanted, you had to wait till the scanning beam reached that part of the screen - serial access. Addressable memory on a grid pattern came much later. Random Access really means "able to access any random address as fast as any other random address". RAM is also not the opposite of ROM :-) -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
