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

[Bobbie Sellers]

On 1/4/21 10:25 PM, Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting Michael Paoli (Michael.Paoli at cal.berkeley.edu):
>
>> Whippersnappers!  ;-)
>>
>> Back in my starving student days, to get extra storage, since
>> I didn't have the 25 cents to spare in my meager budget to buy 100
>> new punch cards (each of which only had 12 rows x 80 columns - so
>> 960 bits, or 120 bytes per card ... 12,000 bytes for your hard
>> earned quarter (or 2 bits, or 6,000 bytes per bit, just to make
>> things really confusing by mixing monetary and data units).
>> But you only got all those bytes if it was in binary....
> "Binary"!  You nouveau riche types.  Back in my day, we could only
> afford unary.  (And we were grateful!)
>
> (Watch out, or we'll end up doing the whole Four Yorkshiremen skit.)
>
>
     And what is wrong with the whole Four Yorkshiremen skit?

     We had no computers in my day.  My first calculator did only 
multiplication and
division, it was a sleeve that wrapped around my pencil. displaying 
tables.  My first
electronic  calculator which I did not want was a gift from someone who 
did not
understand arithmetic very well.  Unary did not exist and binary was 
hidden from
us we had to use 0-9 if we got over counting on our fingers and toes.

     Word Processors are very handy.  I learned Palmer Method with a 
steel dip pen,
and lots of pencils before the pen. My writing was legible  until I 
became a nurse
and had endless charting to do.  But by then we had ballpoint pens and a 
pocket
protector was essential.  My first Word Processor was  PaperClip by 
Batteries, Included
of Canada and ran on the Commodore 64 where I learned to embed formatting
commands and output was to a 9 pin dot matrix and display on a monochrome
Gorilla monitor.  It has a disgusting yellow green color that was 
advertised as amber.

     That word processor came on a 161 kilobyte floppy disk.  The 
floppies were very
expensive costing about $2 each and not all 5.25 floppy disks would work 
in my
  Vic-1451 didk drive with a serial connection

     Oh well enough of the fond recollection of my middle-aged self.

     Gnome 40.x is on the way. I don't see as anything but a variation 
on a theme
but you can read about at the following URL.
<https://news.itsfoss.com/gnome-40-ux-changes/>

     Stay safe all.

     bliss -“Nearly any fool can use a computer. Many do.” After all 
here I am...

     .