On Wed, 2024-12-11 at 18:42 -0600, Nate Bargmann wrote: > > You have four times the RAM of the OP. 4G is incredibly marginal > spec > > for a desktop 2024.
The first computer I was paid to write software for, in 1966, had 1,400 6-bit characters, not bytes, not kB, not MB, not GB. That's why IBM called it the 1401. It was the first mass-produced computer. IBM sold more than 28,000 of them. It was about the size of a four-drawer file cabinet. The clock speed was 83 kHz (not MHz, not GHz). Later in the year it was upgraded to 16K. That added a box about the size of two side-by-side two-drawer file cabinets. I have a 63-phase FORTRAN II compiler for it that runs in 8K. When they added a Tape controller, it was another four-drawer file cabinet. Each drive was the size of a fridge. The card reader and the printer were about the size of a spinet piano. But we did all the company's accounting on it, and accounting for about 1,000 customers nationwide on three others like it. The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, has two of them that work. It's cool that they moved into an old SGI building at 1401 Shoreline Blvd. The last program I wrote before I retired was only about 300,000 lines, but it kept a cluster with 384 cores and 24 GB per core busy for 15 hours per day, on average, doing satellite instrument data analysis. Processing some days' data took 37 hours. Needless to say, if my code had had memory leaks, it wouldn't have run that long. My employer had much nicer computers than mine. The little "supercomputer" fit in one 9U rack panel, but I wouldn't be able to afford water cooling or the electricity bill at home. When they COVID-exiled me, they wouldn't let me have the nice 8-core i7 with 32 GB that had been under my desk; they expected me to get by with my home antique. I retired eighteen months later.
