Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

I hit one of those installation wizards that requests that all other applications be shut down before proceeding (*grumble**mumble*poor OS design*mope*), so I took a moment to watch my XP system idling away, filling 103MB RAM just to do that. And remembering back to when 103MB of RAM would have been enough for more than one thousand six hundred of the computers I'd been using, maxed out.

I'm not asking to go back to that -- I can do so much more with these almost-modern machines. Just musing that the Vaio I'm holding takes sixteen-hundred times as much memory just for the OS to wait for me to ask it to do something, than the most memory I could use up at once keeping a computer busy, way back when.

And although I understand the reasons, it's still just a bit creepy when I think about it that way.

(I'm going to deliberately avoid calculating how long it would take to swap 103MB of virtual memory on a huge bank of 160KB 5.25" floppy drives, or think too hard about the fact that half an hour ago I was using 800MB of VM on this (260MB physical RAM) laptop, and have no idea how much real and virtual memory was being used on the three Linux machines that were displaying apps on this screen via X.

Okay, time to load up those programs again and try to remember where I left off ...