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C'mon Peter,
I'm sure many of us still remember the excitement of getting the
blueprints of our first Altaire. It was a great big step forward from
the cards we used to put our programs on at Uni in the 60s. It had
switches on the front and its memory was measured in Bytes not Mb.
Later toward the end of the 70s we were introduced to "real" home
computing with the advent of the Ti99 series of computers. Here was a
computer. Of course you had to write your own word processor, database,
statistics programs etc. but it had 256 bytes of RAM and 16 Kb of video
RAM and for just $135 you could buy a 32Kb RAM expansion card which took
up the only expansion slot, preventing you from using any other
cartridges, so most of us soldered it into place inside the console.
When 160Kb floppy drives became available we had to design and build our
own disk controllers. (Yes, they were available from the US for $500 but
it was difficult to get them shipped here)

I could go on BUT I wont!

Yes, 512 Mb is a lot of memory, and as this is a pocket computer (sort
of) it is not meant to run NASA. Remember that the computers that got us
to the moon had less power than the average calculator!

Heracles

Peter Rundle wrote:
|> 512MB is more than enough for "ordinary" graphical duties...
|
| Blimey you guys are greedy, when I was a lad we used to have to get up
| half an hour before we went to bed *and* get by on 32Mb running System
| V. My Unix desktop had two 16Mb cards that cost (wait for it) $1600
| each, I.E $100/Mb. Mind you that was only shortly after 80Mb disks for
| Vax systems used to be shipped from the States in a plywood box 3'x2'x2'
| (note: 80*M*byte!). We thought 32Mb of RAM was outrageously generous
| especially when others thought 640K ought to be enough for anybody.
|
| Sigh I miss the bad<del><del><del>good old days. ;-)
|
|
| P.
|
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