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Comment by chx | Hacker News Reader

> My first server had 128MB of RAM

Whippersnappers! :D

The first big iron I had the luck to work with was an IBM 3090 , essentially a gift from IBM, it handled the university entrance exams of the entire country of some ten million people and it had 64 MB of RAM. (It was also the first computer in Hungary permanently connected to the Internet via a leased line to Austria so it had an Austrian IP address. Hungary didn't have its IP region for two more years.)

I think the first machine with 128MB was a VAX 6510 a year or two later at another university. A little bit later, in 1994, CERN had gifted a VAX 9000 with an astounding 256MB of RAM.

To compare, the first server I installed Linux on had a grand total of 4MB RAM -- and that was one of the largest computers a small department at the university had.

It would be a long, long time before "128MB" and "mine" entered the same sentence.

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Shades of the Monty Python sketch here, but the following is true...

4MB?!?

My first encounter with IBM kit was a, er, darn I'm not sure cuz I'm getting old, but I think it was a 4300? Not big iron in some senses, but still with a box that was something like 6-8 feet long iirc and definitely several feet wide and high. (And a bank of about 6-8 tape decks, each as tall as me, and two disk units, each the size of a washing machine, and so on.)

Its RAM? A massive 1 MB.

That IBM kit was the heart of the super new expensive upgrade in 1980 that cost something like 5-10 million pounds iirc to build, including a brand new building to house it and a team of programmers.

The older setup, which is where I was until its last days, was an ICL system that was expanded at the end of its life to a whopping 48KB -- yes, KB -- of RAM.

And that kit ran all the systems, internal (payroll, accounting, etc., etc.) and external (sales etc.) for the largest car dealership in the UK.

128MB? 4MB? Even 1MB? That was an unimaginably insanely large amount of RAM!

(Yes, it was very weird to be working with this physically enormous setup, and dealing with keeping it all cool enough not to halt for a half hour or so, through super human efforts when the A/C broke down, when the likes of PETs, Sinclair Z80s, and Acorn Atoms were a thing...)

> including a brand new building to house it

Ha yes the aforementioned IBM 3090 was so big for installation they removed the roof of the building it was living in, craned it in place and put the roof the back. Bringing it up the elevator or stairs was impossible.

Much later, in the second half of the 90s, I remember the four of us carrying an IBM HDD -- I think it was your normal 5.25" drive but it needed four people because it was mounted on a vibration dampening base ...

> Much later, in the second half of the 90s, I remember the four of us carrying an IBM HDD -- I think it was your normal 5.25" drive but it needed four people because it was mounted on a vibration dampening base ...

Continuing the shades of Monty Python theme[1]:

I remember one of my first few nights being in charge of the new IBM kit (I was a "computer operator" back then, in 1980), leaning back in the fancy new chair at the desk with its fancy "virtual" teletypes (a couple "terminals" displaying the status of the OS with a CICS system), and showing off to an "underling" by swinging a long plastic slide rule or something stupid like that (I no longer recall), and me accidentally banging it on the desk. Right "near" a recessed big red button. Or perhaps "on" the button? As I snapped my head around to look at the button and begin to understand what I may have just done I heard an ominous series of whirring and clicking sounds coming from the cpu box, right near where there was an 8" diskette drive that wasn't supposed to be doing anything while the OS was running (it was just for starting the OS). Then I looked at the console... Uhoh. They didn't fire me but it took months before they decided to let me be "in charge" again with someone else actually hovering over me...

Fast forward to when I was a coder (BCPL) in a small software startup, during the second half of the 80s, presumably 10 years before you were carrying your 5.25" drive monster, I vividly recall someone bringing a 700MB hard drive back from a local computer store. It cost an astonishingly paltry 700 quid or thereabouts. A pound a MB!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKHFZBUTA4k

> I vividly recall someone bringing a 700MB hard drive back from a local computer store. It cost an astonishingly paltry 700 quid or thereabouts.

I ... do not know. That sounds very low. Look at https://jcmit.net/diskprice.htm and note the pound was 1.8-ish around this time so the price should have been well above 1000 pounds even in early 90s. We are talking of a 5.25" full height drive, here's an 1987 model http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/maxtor/MXT8760E.pdf rare in personal computers, it was definitely for workstations / servers.

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