Mimi
Eniko Foxstanding in line for my daily allotted ration of 640kb of RAM
Dźwiedziu@eniko
Timesharing today
pJoske (Jørgen Asmussen)@eniko
You can have a slice of UMB for todays rations
You can have a slice of UMB for todays rations
Luci Bitchface Angerfoot
Dingo
fabiosantoscode@eniko malloc() has never been this slow
Frans
John Maxwell@eniko Shh. Don't say that so loud; it's not safe. There are desperate LLM junkies in this town who'll kill for 1kb.
RootWyrm 🇺🇦
@eniko due to the latest antics by <just gestures> the daily allotment has been reduced to 512Kb.
Von Xylofon
🇺🇦 haxadecimal 🚫👑
Curious@eniko at front of line, there is no RAM today, only discount voucher to briefly rent the RAM from the LLM that bought yours for x15 times the cost (after discount).
The best the Black market dude in the alley behind has is iomega Zip discs.
The best the Black market dude in the alley behind has is iomega Zip discs.
Nazo@curiously @eniko I'm trying to imagine how bad swapping on zip disks would be and I am utterly failing to imagine how horrible it would be.
Like, at a certain point some things would start timing out as they "hang" while waiting and the OS would start trying to kill them wouldn't it?
@nazokiyoubinbou @eniko I think that the caffeine induced psychotic break from making your 163rd cup to tea from the several minute pause whenever you tried to launch an app, save a file or export any data would kill the process as you slammed it against the wall screaming manically
@curiously @eniko You know, jokes aside, I actually have a bit of experience of how horrible this type of thing can get. Oh it wasn't on a zip disk or even anything as horrible as, say, tape, but I did run Windows 3.1 on a 286 once. Turns out you can actually do so if you run it in "standard mode." (win /s)
I don't know the exact specifics of how it works, but as far as I can tell it has to swap back and forth practically everything almost continuously. It literally took something like 15 minutes to even just start. Literally. Just to start. (Ironically it would run kind of ok with really simple stuff once it did start, but when I typed win /s I got up and walked away to do literally anything else for a while...)
@nazokiyoubinbou @eniko as a kid I remember these IBM stacked platter hard drives. They had tolerances of a few degrees C and lived in an aggressively air conditioned room with the mainframe that had about 8 users in an early CAD system. If they all sent rendering or pathfinding requests the extra heat would buildup and would nudge the head float distance and they'd drop into failed write, verify, attempt rewrite loop. A couple of techs would attempt to surf the aircon temps the rest would play table tennis because it was going to several matches before anything would process
Timberwolf@eniko No one could ever possibly need more than 640KB!*
*It turns out no one actually said that, but it's still a meme anyway.
Kawaoneechan@nazokiyoubinbou @eniko "640 K ought to be enough for anybody." — Bill Gates, allegedly
"I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time ... I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that says 640 K of memory is enough. There's never a citation; the quotation just floats like a rumor, repeated again and again." — Bill Gates, 1996
@kawa @eniko Yeah, lol, I saw that too.
It really does make sense that he wouldn't have said it. I honestly believe him. And, as is pointed out there, there is no actual specific citation of him saying it in a specific place.
But you know, I bet someone, somewhere, was stupid enough to think it. Probably in the days where 64K seemed like a lot. "What about someday years from now when there's ten times that?" "Huh? Who could ever use that much?" 😁
@nazokiyoubinbou @eniko Yeah that sounds feasible.
"Do you realize the pain the industry went through while the IBM PC was limited to 640 K? The machine was going to be 512 K at one point, and we kept pushing it up. I never said that statement — I said the opposite of that." — Bill Gates, 2014
@nazokiyoubinbou @eniko I have wikiquote open in another tab lol
grapeshot@nazokiyoubinbou @kawa @eniko
Bill Gates was boasting in an interview in the first issue of PC magazine that being able to address 10x the ram of CP/M would make memory limitations "for all practical purposes go away" though he didn't quite say the Famous Quote
Bill Gates was boasting in an interview in the first issue of PC magazine that being able to address 10x the ram of CP/M would make memory limitations "for all practical purposes go away" though he didn't quite say the Famous Quote
@grapeshot @kawa @eniko I'm not sure how to take that one. It feels like a more full text of whatever he said might be necessary to judge what it really means. For example, if it meant the current memory limitations go away, then that would obviously make sense. Or if it just meant the limitations hindering something specific, then in that context it would make sense.
So honestly I don't really know how to take that.
@nazokiyoubinbou https://archive.org/details/PC-Mag-1982-02 see for yourself (interview starts p. 16)
@grapeshot Ok, I found it. There is indeed a very specific context to that statement. It was a discussion about going from 8-bit processors to 16-bit processors with a megabyte (or possibly more, but he specifically pointed to the 8088.) He was talking specifically about their work in BASIC and how every time they added a new feature it took away the available address space that users would have to work with and how having so much more would effectively eliminate that particular issue.
That's pretty much one specific piece of software at one specific time. Practically one specific version. It would eliminate the problem with that software at that time, not all software for all time.
Really the point he was just making there was "we need to get past 8-bit limitations already."
@nazokiyoubinbou It would have been possible to include hardware bank switching on the 8088 PC to get around the address space limitations, but no one saw a need yet in 1980. Gates was trying to think 5 years ahead not 20 or 45 but memory prices dropped even faster than that.
@grapeshot I don't disagree with any of that of course, but the point is that in this specific context it doesn't really seem to be a statement that having 256KB of RAM would be enough even for five years from then, just that it would be enough for the stuff they were doing with BASIC right then and there.
That's one specific software and it doesn't even seem to have been part of the five years ahead speculation but merely the "why we need to be switching to 16-bit right now instead of staying on 8-bit." He seemed to be focused in that particular question on specifically trying to convince people it was time to start going to a new generation of processors.
Lily
Hannah (With a snake problem 🐍)@eniko Bold of you to assume that it actually is 640kb 
Y⃒̸̷̝̜̙ͥͥͥngmar@eniko Hey kid, wanna try a HIMEM.SYS? 👀
Jamie 
ColorfulCeleste@eniko The Protogens are in shambles.
joat