3 ms·
At the time I remember being amazed that the company I worked for paid out $$$ to get some SGI machines up to ~160Mb of RAM. This was because the software we us
by Theodores 8y ago
At the time I remember being amazed that the company I worked for paid out $$$ to get some SGI machines up to ~160Mb of RAM. This was because the software we used had a memory leak of some sorts and needed such an extravagantly 'wasteful' amount of memory.
Having the sockets to support up to 160Mb was one thing, having long enough arms and deep enough pockets to pay for it was something else. Hence 'unimaginable'.
Nowadays you get a couple of sockets on your laptop, back then whether laptop or something else, a workstation would have lots and lots of sockets for memory, usually with very few of them filled.
- ken 8y agoI was a student at the time, and all the computer science researchers I knew were maxing out their laptops with 128 MB. In the June 1998 MacWorld, you could order a 128 MB upgrade for your brand new PowerBook G3 for $389 [1]. Not cheap, but not that extravagant. [1] https://archive.org/details/MacWorld_9806_June_1998/page/n133 https://archive.org/details/MacWorld_9806_June_1998/page/n13...
- Theodores 8y agoAh but that was for a Mac. In the days before the internet as we know it you didn't have commodity RAM for workstations. You had to pay extra or risk voiding your warranty. Plus someone else was paying so why run the risk? Sure the chips were commodity but the modules would have a different pinout. They would be advertised as better.t Another problem was that the more memory you bought the more it cost per megabyte. A set of chips to fill the sockets with 128Mb would cost three times as much as a set of chips that filled the sockets to give 64Mb.