Re: 64 gig memory

On Aug 29, 12:57 pm, hanco...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:
> I saw an ad for IBM's Z9 mainframe, saying it had 64 gigabytes of core
> (RAM) memory.  My first thought was "64, that's kind of low", and then
> I realized we were' talking gig, not meg, not K.
>
> When I started we had a machine with 192K sup****t an entire hospital.
> My next job was big time, 8 Meg, with maybe 1-2 gigabytes in disk
> memory (3330s with 200Meg packs).
>
> It blows my mind that everything we had on disk memory could now be
> left permanently in core memory since it's so cheap and we have so
> much of it.  Of course, disk memory is cheap too.

I thought I was pretty hot stuff when I got to run some jobs on a Cray
1, 1 Mwords = 8 Mbytes, and later on a X-MP with 16 Mwords = 128
Mbytes. Neither was by any definition "my machine", I just got to run
jobs in a queue after everybody else at the computer center.

CPU-wise it wasn't until the mid-90's that I got an Alpha on my desk
that was competitive with those Cray's, and of course by that time
UIUC and SDSC had Y-MP's which had already leapfrogged ahead :-).

Tim.