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Comment by johnklos | Hacker News Reader

True, but there were wonderful exceptions. For instance, the Mac SE/30 (1989) could take up to 128 megs, and the Amiga 3000 (1990) was designed to allow for even more (although only 16 megs on the motherboard, but 256 meg Zorro III cards were available in 1993).

Later, some m68k Macs like the Quadra 605 allowed for 128 meg SIMMs, and the PCI Power Macs really took things to a new level. The Power Mac 9500 could take up to 1.5 gigs of memory in 1995.

It's a shame that no computers really distinguish themselves like that any more, aside from high end server systems.

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> The Power Mac 9500 could take up to 1.5 gigs of memory in 1995.

> It's a shame that no computers really distinguish themselves like that any more, aside from high end server systems.

Well, intel mac pro from 2019 could take up to 1.5TB of ram while I would guess standard back then for PCs was 16-32GB at most. So should be comparable (1.5GB vs 16-32MB of ram in 1995)?

in the bracket that intel mac pro from 2019 competed, 1.5TB capability would be about normal. With some supporting more.

Eh to be fair I think the main reason Zorro III RAM cards didn't appear until way after the first Zorro III machine is that Zorro III wasn't coupled to CPU speed so sticking RAM there wasn't great from a performance perspective - you really needed to use the CPU slot to extend beyond 18MB (remember the 2MB of Chip in addition to the 16MB of Fast) in a useful way

The studio I worked at during that time actually did have a CPU slot based memory extension that can handle I believe up to 256 Mb, this would have been around 92 or 93, but I'm not sure how early it was offered on the market that's just when I started there and it was already in the shop.

I don't recall the name of it though but I remember that it was a peculiar PCB design, with part of it resembling a breadboard. I think the name started with Ex, like Excelsior or Excalibur or something like that.

You didn't mention what machine this was on. Since you mention a breadboard, are you sure it wasn't an addon to an existing CPU card? Perhaps the X-Calibur, that plugged into the Commodore A3640? That's a bit later, though.

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