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

[Dan Murphy]

I’m old enough to remember going to a company to see a computer that had 1 MEG of RAM
And you had to wait in line if you wanted to use the CRT

> On Jan 5, 2021, at 1:00 PM, Bobbie Sellers <bliss-sf4ever at dslextreme.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> 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...
> 
>     .
> 
> 
> 
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