5 ms·

I vividly remember the moment I was reading about the IBM mainframes used by NASA during the 1960s, trying to convert the words of memory from the amount of bit

I vividly remember the moment I was reading about the IBM mainframes used by NASA during the 1960s, trying to convert the words of memory from the amount of bits the system used, to something more modern to give me some perspective. Naturally, I fired up [Microsoft] Calculator, and arrived at something like 4kb. Later, I had to force quit a stalled process and opened Task Manager, to find that I had forgot to close Calculator. There it was, idling at 20mb. Initially, I thought perhaps it was slowly leaking memory, so I restarted it. Just the same. Now, I can already anticipate someone motivating why a calculator needs to exceed the computing power of calculating ~5000 space programs. To that I say, Windows 95 runs at 4mb of memory. Microsoft Calculator is not more complex than Windows 95. At least, I deeply hope that it isn't.

gbertasius 5y ago
Last I checked the new calculator has graphing and math notation support.
- Jtsummers 5y ago
  Calculator was using that much RAM even 15 or 20 years ago, long before it got the fancy new features.
- temac 5y ago
  A TI89 has that too, and probably way more features.
  - creato 5y ago
    The TI89 is a ridiculous outlier in terms of capability to compute resources though. Every other piece of software I can think of is a pathetic joke in comparison.
dijit 5y ago
It is not impossible that a large amount of that memory is for rendering high resolution images and glyphs. Resolution does nasty things to memory. As does having every memory allocation be 64bits wide (instead of 8 or 16). Though I agree with your sentiment.
- ithkuil 5y ago
  How do you waste memory? First, one bit at a time, then one gigabyte at a time.
  - bottled_poe 5y ago
    I think a downvote on this is unfair. Excessive memory usage starts in the data model. And yea, a difference of a few bytes there can quickly stack up (sorry for pun).
    - collinvandyck76 5y ago
      heap up, even!
- est31 5y ago
  PDP-6's Type 360 CRT had a reachable resolution of 1024x1024 pixels, with 3 bit per pixel for intensity level. I was a vector based screen so was operating a bit differently compared to modern framebuffer based screens. Works for text based applications like hn for example, but fails for video or picture heavy stuff like what we have in social networks, youtube, etc. I agree though that framebuffers put a hard lower limit onto how much RAM you have to use if you want to write a graphical application or even entire OS that saves resources.
  - sitkack 5y ago
    That is amazing, what year is this, like 1967?
    - kens 5y ago
      The manual for the DEC 340 Display (c1964) is online: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/graphics/7-13_340_Display_Programming_Manual.pdf http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/graphics/7-13_340_Display_P... The display is a refrigerator-sized unit with a big circular CRT in the middle. You give it vectors and characters, and it draws them with 1024x1024 resolution. It also had a light pen that you could use for interaction with the display.
gerdesj 5y ago
"To that I say, Windows 95 runs at 4mb of memory." My second PC was a 80486/25MHz with 4Mb of RAM - four 1MB DIMMs. I skipped 80386! Anyway, that box ran Win 95 eventually after DOS 6 and Win 3.1, then 3.11 W4WG. I also tried out OS/2 on it - 24 1.44Mb floppies I think. It had a new MB with a DX2/66 and loads of RAM (32Mb) later on and ran Win98. I grew up shortly after that and Linux is my weapon errr OS of choice. Looks quite cool these days and I get less problems with Teams than my MS sporting colleagues. When I need to get something installed I ask pacman or yay to install it and then crack on, whilst my colleagues play with Google and dodgy downloads. Anyway, on Win9x, calc ran quite happily on a box with 4Mb RAM. Word 2.0 worked too ...
hinkley 5y ago
I watched a presentation on the Apollo Guidance Computer recently. I'd seen one before but this one had a lot more information. The ROM on the device was just a series of magnets and wires. Magnetic core memory without the extra wires to write the values. Instead the values were 'written' by having someone thread the wires through the right magnets. Thousands of times. It was a very surreal "wait, that's how they did that? ...well of course, how else would they do that?" moment.
dghughes 5y ago
I liked the explanation Dave from Dave's Garage gave in his "Why does rebooting fix everything" video. The hypothetical example he gave of a Canadian word like "colour" versus "color" that u may eventually cause a memory leak. US programmers wouldn't think of it as a bug since they'd only assume color existed not colour. Timestamp 2:55 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IPP39OF78M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IPP39OF78M
Koshkin 5y ago
Windows 3.0 happily ran on 1 MB. (Though a real hog compared to the first version of UNIX which needed 24 KB of RAM to be able to run the userspace.)
- dylan604 5y ago
  That's a stretch. Was Windows 3.0 ever happy?
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Windows 3.0 happily ran on 1 MB. IIRC, Windows 3.0 didn't run happily in any circumstances, that had to wait for 3.1.
  - vidarh 5y ago
    AmigaOS then, which had similar requirements when adding up the ROM and RAM, and which did run happily.
kumarvvr 5y ago
That 20 MB of space, would mostly be for writing graphics code. All the images, resources, hidden stuff, animations, code to run those animations, etc. Its not that the core program has increased in size or has lost performance, but that the code required to build a good program based on that core has increased exponentially. Also, as a developer, I usually don't care much about memory until I complete the program, check if its consuming abnormally high memory and then sit about to optimize. So, the developer for calculator.exe saw that the program consumes about 0.125% of commonly available memory size (16 GB), and probably concluded that its good enough for a program that is opened and closed, maybe 10 times a day. Its the same with processing power. Unless you are writing highly resource hungry systems, losing a few thousand cycles here and there are not an issue. Compounding this problem is the depth of the tech stack and the typical number of stacks used for an application have increased tremendously.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
  I’m still floored when I use the MacBook calculator to calculate something like 873*523 and it takes 3 seconds to get an answer. Not sure why. There’s no animation that I can see and the it has the foreground.
  - kumarvvr 5y ago
    I guess we can chalk it up to OS prioritization or something similar. With no other programs running, calculator on my Windows does everything instantly. With Chrome or Firefox, it lags. I would also guess that the OS considers the calculator as non critical or something.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    This has been bugging the shiznit out of me. However, I dont think it is taking that long to compute. I think it is just not displaying the answer until a redraw like moving window. Whatever the cause, it's absolutely a joke that it is still not fixed.
    - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
jodrellblank 5y ago
I more ask, how much money and effort would you spend for a calculator program which saved that $0.16c worth of RAM[1] which you didn't even notice was being used until something else drew it to your attention? If someone built one, would you buy it? I can only suspect not, since there are a lot of calculator apps out there which you could have found and installed for free. You probably used more paper in your lifetime of printing and book reading and newspaper buying and phonebook and bank statement receiving than Euclid, Pythagoras, Archimedes, Euler, Gauss and Newton combined, is that a problem worth solving? [1] first price for memory I found on Crucial.com was 8GB for $67.99. Other prices are available.
- tapland 5y ago
  It's using more than ripcord, the discord client, even when using voice chat. Compare that to the official app that makes you have to worry about ram prices and actually takes a good chunk of a modern common pcs memory.
  - jodrellblank 5y ago
    Discord is using 157MB of 24GB on my desktop right now. 0.6% On my laptop, 114MB of 8GB. 1.3%. I even used Windows Calculator to work out these percentages because the effort to make the "calculator" button on the keyboard load another calculator, and find another one to load, and learn to use it, to save 19MB of RAM for a few seconds is not worth it.

gbertasius 5y ago

Last I checked the new calculator has graphing and math notation support.

Jtsummers 5y ago
Calculator was using that much RAM even 15 or 20 years ago, long before it got the fancy new features.
temac 5y ago
A TI89 has that too, and probably way more features.
- creato 5y ago
  The TI89 is a ridiculous outlier in terms of capability to compute resources though. Every other piece of software I can think of is a pathetic joke in comparison.

dijit 5y ago

It is not impossible that a large amount of that memory is for rendering high resolution images and glyphs. Resolution does nasty things to memory. As does having every memory allocation be 64bits wide (instead of 8 or 16). Though I agree with your sentiment.

ithkuil 5y ago
How do you waste memory? First, one bit at a time, then one gigabyte at a time.
- bottled_poe 5y ago
  I think a downvote on this is unfair. Excessive memory usage starts in the data model. And yea, a difference of a few bytes there can quickly stack up (sorry for pun).
  - collinvandyck76 5y ago
    heap up, even!
est31 5y ago
PDP-6's Type 360 CRT had a reachable resolution of 1024x1024 pixels, with 3 bit per pixel for intensity level. I was a vector based screen so was operating a bit differently compared to modern framebuffer based screens. Works for text based applications like hn for example, but fails for video or picture heavy stuff like what we have in social networks, youtube, etc. I agree though that framebuffers put a hard lower limit onto how much RAM you have to use if you want to write a graphical application or even entire OS that saves resources.
- sitkack 5y ago
  That is amazing, what year is this, like 1967?
  - kens 5y ago
    The manual for the DEC 340 Display (c1964) is online: http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/graphics/7-13_340_Display_Programming_Manual.pdf http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/graphics/7-13_340_Display_P... The display is a refrigerator-sized unit with a big circular CRT in the middle. You give it vectors and characters, and it draws them with 1024x1024 resolution. It also had a light pen that you could use for interaction with the display.

gerdesj 5y ago

"To that I say, Windows 95 runs at 4mb of memory." My second PC was a 80486/25MHz with 4Mb of RAM - four 1MB DIMMs. I skipped 80386! Anyway, that box ran Win 95 eventually after DOS 6 and Win 3.1, then 3.11 W4WG. I also tried out OS/2 on it - 24 1.44Mb floppies I think. It had a new MB with a DX2/66 and loads of RAM (32Mb) later on and ran Win98. I grew up shortly after that and Linux is my weapon errr OS of choice. Looks quite cool these days and I get less problems with Teams than my MS sporting colleagues. When I need to get something installed I ask pacman or yay to install it and then crack on, whilst my colleagues play with Google and dodgy downloads. Anyway, on Win9x, calc ran quite happily on a box with 4Mb RAM. Word 2.0 worked too ...

hinkley 5y ago

I watched a presentation on the Apollo Guidance Computer recently. I'd seen one before but this one had a lot more information. The ROM on the device was just a series of magnets and wires. Magnetic core memory without the extra wires to write the values. Instead the values were 'written' by having someone thread the wires through the right magnets. Thousands of times. It was a very surreal "wait, that's how they did that? ...well of course, how else would they do that?" moment.

dghughes 5y ago

I liked the explanation Dave from Dave's Garage gave in his "Why does rebooting fix everything" video. The hypothetical example he gave of a Canadian word like "colour" versus "color" that u may eventually cause a memory leak. US programmers wouldn't think of it as a bug since they'd only assume color existed not colour. Timestamp 2:55 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IPP39OF78M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IPP39OF78M

Koshkin 5y ago

Windows 3.0 happily ran on 1 MB. (Though a real hog compared to the first version of UNIX which needed 24 KB of RAM to be able to run the userspace.)

dylan604 5y ago
That's a stretch. Was Windows 3.0 ever happy?
dragonwriter 5y ago
> Windows 3.0 happily ran on 1 MB. IIRC, Windows 3.0 didn't run happily in any circumstances, that had to wait for 3.1.
- vidarh 5y ago
  AmigaOS then, which had similar requirements when adding up the ROM and RAM, and which did run happily.

kumarvvr 5y ago

That 20 MB of space, would mostly be for writing graphics code. All the images, resources, hidden stuff, animations, code to run those animations, etc. Its not that the core program has increased in size or has lost performance, but that the code required to build a good program based on that core has increased exponentially. Also, as a developer, I usually don't care much about memory until I complete the program, check if its consuming abnormally high memory and then sit about to optimize. So, the developer for calculator.exe saw that the program consumes about 0.125% of commonly available memory size (16 GB), and probably concluded that its good enough for a program that is opened and closed, maybe 10 times a day. Its the same with processing power. Unless you are writing highly resource hungry systems, losing a few thousand cycles here and there are not an issue. Compounding this problem is the depth of the tech stack and the typical number of stacks used for an application have increased tremendously.

TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
I’m still floored when I use the MacBook calculator to calculate something like 873*523 and it takes 3 seconds to get an answer. Not sure why. There’s no animation that I can see and the it has the foreground.
- kumarvvr 5y ago
  I guess we can chalk it up to OS prioritization or something similar. With no other programs running, calculator on my Windows does everything instantly. With Chrome or Firefox, it lags. I would also guess that the OS considers the calculator as non critical or something.
- dylan604 5y ago
  This has been bugging the shiznit out of me. However, I dont think it is taking that long to compute. I think it is just not displaying the answer until a redraw like moving window. Whatever the cause, it's absolutely a joke that it is still not fixed.
  - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago

jodrellblank 5y ago

I more ask, how much money and effort would you spend for a calculator program which saved that $0.16c worth of RAM[1] which you didn't even notice was being used until something else drew it to your attention? If someone built one, would you buy it? I can only suspect not, since there are a lot of calculator apps out there which you could have found and installed for free. You probably used more paper in your lifetime of printing and book reading and newspaper buying and phonebook and bank statement receiving than Euclid, Pythagoras, Archimedes, Euler, Gauss and Newton combined, is that a problem worth solving? [1] first price for memory I found on Crucial.com was 8GB for $67.99. Other prices are available.

tapland 5y ago
It's using more than ripcord, the discord client, even when using voice chat. Compare that to the official app that makes you have to worry about ram prices and actually takes a good chunk of a modern common pcs memory.
- jodrellblank 5y ago
  Discord is using 157MB of 24GB on my desktop right now. 0.6% On my laptop, 114MB of 8GB. 1.3%. I even used Windows Calculator to work out these percentages because the effort to make the "calculator" button on the keyboard load another calculator, and find another one to load, and learn to use it, to save 19MB of RAM for a few seconds is not worth it.