4 ms·
Holy crap that's a lot of RAM for 1998. I hit 2GB about 10 years later when I got a Core2Duo workstation.
by qplex 9y ago
Holy crap that's a lot of RAM for 1998.
I hit 2GB about 10 years later when I got a Core2Duo workstation.
- walrus01 9y agoI think OP is mistaken, 512 MB was max in a sparcstation 20. Unless they were working at LLNL or Brookhaven Labs on something very special affording 2GB of ram in a 1997 desktop workstation would have been nearly impossible to justify financially. And probably wouldn't have been a sun, it would have been a $35,000 SGI. Such as a Onyx or Onyx2, or Challenge. Something r4400 based.
- wowtip 9y agoYes, my old (but at the time still usable) windows box had 2 GB hard drive and 8 MB RAM in 1997.
- michrassena 9y agoI think you're right, 97 is too early for an affordable computer with 2GB. But it wasn't just SGI that had those capabilities, I bought a used HP Visualize J2240 (manufactured circa 1997-8) in the early 2000s (like 2003) and it came to me with 2GB of RAM, with a max of 4GB. This machine was also very expensive when new, in the same range as the $35K SGI you refer to.
- cicero 9y agoI worked on a project in 1993 for which we bought a SparcStation 20 with 1 GB of RAM, but we used it with 2 X-Terminals to support 3 developers. At the time we thought 1 GB of RAM was crazy! I believe the machine cost us $10K. So, I can imagine 5 years later a SS 20 with 2 GB of RAM would be considered obsolete tech, but I think $1000 would not be a bad price for it. (I see Wikipedia says the SS20 maxed out at 512 MB, but I distinctly remember having 1 GB because it seemed like such an astronomical number at the time, considering my first computer had 16K.)