When given the chance to explain an idea, I gravitate towards words. Expressing ideas through mathematics was never a forte. Yesterday's entry, about adding RAM to my computer, prompted me to dust off a calculator. I blithely mentioned having a gigabyte and a half of memory now. Somehow, this number no longer seems astronomical as digital cameras and mp3 players now sport comparable numbers.Still, from a historical perspective, that's a lot of memory. I could probably use RAM size as a means of sequencing events in my life. For example, when moving to Canada, my computer had just 128 megabytes. Further back, in the middle of my tenure at the Higher Colleges of Technology, the average computer had 2 megabytes. Retreating to my first IBM compatible reminds me that I once did all my computing in 640K because the space between there and one megabyte was used for 'system housekeeping'. Wait, I can go back further to college days! My trusty and true TRS-80 had a whopping 16 kilobytes which is about the same as the file of this calculator image. I had upgraded the Radio Shack device from an original 4K.
Let's take a look at the bytes represented in those abbreviations:
TRS-80 Model 1Damn, my calculator doesn't have enough digits! Again, remembering that I'm no math genius, I think that's an increase of around three hundred and seventy five thousand percent. I wish my bank account had increased as dramatically in the last 25 years!
4,096 bytes
RAM in Current PC
1,536,000,000 bytes