On Wed, 5 May 2004 12:49:04 +0100 "Tony S. Sykes" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I think this might be the high standard system spec around in 2 years > time anyway. Scary thought though that we will have 2 gig of memory > and a terabyte of disk space in one machine. Just put in perspective, that's a LOT. :() As I remarked in another message, our community college (circa early eighties) had a mainframe with only 2 megs of core. And the system could only address 16 megabytes, the remainder was virtual memory (i.e., the other 14). The whole campus used it (administration, grades & such, plus the computing lab). Now, I have a *video card* with more than that on it, and it's not even considered a lot by modern standards, since it has only 16 megs. Years ago, I had an ST-225 hard disk (20 megs). A little math tells me that for my present situation, I would need the equivalent of 1500 (!) of these all hooked together to get an equivalent amount of storage (30 gig). And 30 gigs is not a whole lot either by today's standards; in fact, it's a little tight right now if I try to do lots of video encoding with it. 2 gigs of RAM isn't out of reach right now -- many people have that on their desktops. I have only 3/4 of a gig :(, which at least for now is more than comfortable. 256 megs *used* to be comfortable, but some tasks, such as slogging through alt.binaries newsgroups using pan, it's simply not enough -- it starts to swap like hell. With 3/4 of a gig, I can finally run it through to completion on a number of larger binaries newsgroups, and it only sucks up 750 megs or so of VM in the process (!). Terabyte-sized hard disks (boy that's a LOT of room) aren't that big of a stretch; long ago I figured they'd be around by 2010, which is only a few years away. Right now (I haven't really checked), 300 gig or so is about the most I've seen on a single drive. And, as I remarked in another thread sometime back, it's not just the OS that is going to require honking gobs of resources, it's the applications and the data sets they use (f.i., the aforementioned pan). If more people are going to use their systems for things that require concurrent access to gobs of data, such as video storage & retrieval, or DVD encoding, or simply slogging through Usenet :), obviously their machines are going to have to keep up, regardless of which OS is being used. -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ David E. Fox Thanks for letting me [EMAIL PROTECTED] change magnetic patterns [EMAIL PROTECTED] on your hard disk. -----------------------------------------------------------------------
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