[sf-lug] PC with only 4 GiB of installed RAM (was the most recent: "some notes..."

[Akkana Peck]

Michael Paoli writes:
> <cough, cough> "only" 4 GiB of RAM.  Heh.
> 
> $ cat /etc/debian_version && uname -m && head -n 1 /proc/meminfo
> 10.7
> x86_64
> MemTotal:         131296 kB
> $
> 
> Whippersnappers!  ;-)

[great story about how to save money on punch cards, snipped]

I can't beat that story! And I only used punch cards once. But I
can contribute a slightly later memory, from when my high school
Computer Science club ran bake sales and car washess for three years
to afford the $550 or so to buy a TRS-80. At the end of those three
years, goal finally reached, one of the teachers unexpectedly thew
in some extra cash -- enough to buy the deluxe high-end TRS-80 with
8K of RAM instead of 4K, plus a cassette drive to store programs.

8K of RAM! How could you ever fill that much memory? Impossible!

(As it happens, we never found out, because it turned out they
wouldn't let us use the TRS-80 unless a teacher volunteered to
keep a classroom open after school, and the teacher who had been
helping the CS club had left and none of the others were interested.
Fortunately for me, by then I'd managed to bum a guest account
on a Unix PDP-11/34 at a local college.)

Oh, and on the 4Gb question, my Asus 1015E with 2G RAM still works
fine with Debian and Openbox, as long as I don't use too many tabs
in Firefox, and avoid bloatware like LibreOffice. +1 to everything
Michael and Rick already said.

        ...Akkana