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Thanks for the memories......

Whoever said “no one will ever need more than 640k”?

I remember when I started working in IT as if it was yesterday, the Netherland had just beaten the Soviet Union 2-0 in the Euro 88 Final, Piper Alpha was destroyed by a terrible explosion and Compaq released the Deskpro 386/25, what a machine!

I had just started at an AutoCAD main dealer in the engineering department, building and installing CAD systems and networks.

The standard CAD machine was based around a 386 processor, 1024 x 768 graphics card, 20Mb hard disk and 1Mb of memory!

It amazes me to think back to those days, the hours of fun (not!) spent playing around with products like QEMM and 386MAX, trying to squeeze every last K out of the memory so the customer could have the background plotting software running at the same time as AutoCAD.  Oh for another megabyte, and don’t even ask about the price!

Later, when I was working for GEC, we needed to upgrade 50 machines to 4Mb in order to run Visio.  I distinctly remember the price…£175 per SIMM. (I also remember it was delivered by Securicor, back in the days when computers used to be RAM raided).

At Xpertise I’m responsible (amongst other things) for the classroom equipment that our customers use on the courses. And here too, I’ve seen the amount of RAM required for each course shoot up. When I started teaching 32Mb was standard, NT4 took that up to 128Mb, Windows 2000 really needed 512Mb (and that was before you started to do anything). 2003 needed 1Gb.

And then Microsoft discovered virtualisation and things started to get very silly indeed.

Sure Microsoft “said” that the official courses would run on 1Gb, but then again they told us Windows 95 would work of 4Mb (how many of you believed that?) so in the classrooms we took the decision to standardise on 2Gb. When Microsoft said 2Gb was the norm, we installed 4. You can see a pattern emerging here I hope.

Well, guess who said 4Gb was required for Windows 2008 courses a couple of weeks ago? So here I am, waiting for those nice people from Dell to drop 4 classrooms worth of smart new boxes on my doorstep.

8Gb, Dual Core VT CPU’s, 19” flat panels, Dual SATA disks, believe me, the new courses are going to use every bit of the resources we can throw at them, I’ve tried them.

And all for less than the price of 1Mb of RAM 20 years ago.

Whoever said “no one will ever need more than 640k”?