Discussion Memory Through Time

[jnjnilson6]

What do you think about system memory through the years? Lightly piquing and definitely worthwhile for a system in tune with the times, meaningful to the point of major cardinality in the past days of hardware and furthermore stretching too ahead and being ever an intriguing and effectually rebounding topic.

Write up what you think about RAM in the future, RAM in the past, RAM in systems you've had, and anything related to the topic in order that there would appear a benefactory and beautiful boon in the magnanimous sphere of symposium.

Thank you!

 

[USAFRet]

And before that, a Commodore VIC-20.
5kb RAM

I still have one. I think it still runs.

 

[CountMike]

Simclair with 1MB.

 

[hotaru.hino]

Well the ultimate goal would be to compress the memory hierarchy to a point where there's as few layers as possible. But I don't think we'll ever reach a 1 hierarchy system.

The last I heard with memory technology that was supposed to usher a sort of new golden age was when we realized memristers since it was simple, fast, and non-volatile. And there's always talk about some sort of non-volatile memory being in place of traditional DRAM memory, but I think from a security standpoint we won't shift to non-volatile memory until we overcome the problem of what do we do when it contains sensitive data? I mean I guess we could start using end-to-end encryption on everything, but I could also see that going horribly wrong if you so much as look at it funny.

 

[jnjnilson6]

Simclair with 1MB.

That's very nice!

I still think that the jump to 1 GB RAM in about 2005 was when things started appearing on the major scale at last. You could open over 40 tabs in Chrome with a Pentium 4 and the aforementioned amount of memory; it seems that these times were what started to transfer us to very powerful productivity and unlimited performance in terms of the hardware sphere.

It was the milestone past which computers were Really fast.
The Pentium 4 era was the first time we saw clock speeds like those we see today.

Still quite sad for all the people who'd got 256 MB (including myself) or under when the 1 GB RAM era hit; everything needed more RAM in those days. But I think it was a great bouleversement of specification and a time which will mark indefinitely a cardinal jump in performance and open up capabilities which heretofore were only a distant potentiality.