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Comment by phil21 | Hacker News Reader

8GB -> 32GB doesn't really give you a whole lot more than opening more browser tabs or whatnot. Cache some more filesystem into memory I suppose.

8MB -> 32MB enabled entirely new categories of (consumer-level) software. It would be a game changer for performance as you were no longer swapping to (exceedingly slow) disk.

They simply are not comparable, imo. 8MB to 32MB was night and day difference and you would drool over the idea of someday being able to afford such a luxury. 8GB to 32GB was at least until very recently a nice to have for power users.

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Going from 4MB to 16MB made Autocad and Orcad Capture under Win 3.1 no longer slow.

I remember a few years before that you'd zoom in on a drawing and do as much as you could without zooming back out because it would take a full minute to redraw the screen. And then another minute to zoom back in somewhere else.

Depends on your definition of "there". Going from 8MB to 32MB did very little for you pre Windows95. Every piece of x86 software up to that point was maxing below 8MB because ram was insanely expensive and you needed to populate 4 modules at a time. Motherboards came standard with 4 or 8 ram slots limiting your ram choices to 1,2,4,5,8,16,17,20,32 MB with last 4 costing more than motherboard and CPU combined.

In 1992 standard desktop was still 386 + 4MB, with highend 486 + 8MB. 1MB SIMM was $30-50. 4MB $150 January 1992, dropping to $100 in December 1992, and back to $130 in December 1994.

Afaik 72 pin simms were first introduced in 1989 IBM PS/2 (55SX? proprietary variant) and later around 1993 in clones. You could run 1,2,3 or 4 simms of any size independently. In December 1994 2MB 72pin Simm was $80, 4MB $150, 8MB $300, 16MB $560. 32MB $1200, 64MB $2800.

486DX2-66 itself was ~$300, + $100 VLB motherboard meanwhile $1100 got you Pentium 90MHz with PCI motherboard. In December 1994 for the price of 486 with 32MB ram ($1600) you could have bought P90 with 16MB ($1660).

Thank you for this. It all sounds correct to me and brought back so many things I’d forgotten – but now I’m really curious how you remember these dates and numbers. My memory for details like these is pretty strong, but this level of recall is remarkable. I’m genuinely impressed.

Its cut&paste of research I did for Vogons (retro computing forum) post some time ago in my "I need to know everything about SIMM ram" phase :-)

Personally I started with PCs around 1995 and this I remember vividly due to major mistake* I made :) I had a school friend working weekends at the local computer fleamarket scrounge for me the cheapest second hand components possible to build barebones 386 system (minimum to play Doom*/Privateer) piece by piece in $50 increments. Tiny motherboard with soldered Am386DX40 + case was first. Next months $50 paid for 4MB, ISA VGA, keyboard and FDD. This got me off the ground once I hobbled together VGA to SCART cable with special driver to use TV instead of expensive VGA monitor. Third installment another 4MB and 40MB HDD, and the final $50 concluded build with sound card, CDROM and a mouse :)

* I will never forget my friend trying to convince me to throw extra $10 for a 486SX25 on a VLB board and me casually saying 'bah bro thats a tasty pizza money thanks but no thanks' :| This fatal f-up meant 5-9fps in Doom instead of what one would call fluid at the time 10-15 fps on 486SX25+VLB, motivated me to get into PC building and started my career in IT. 3 years later I was working in a service center for regional PC components distributor.

Disk speed is definitely a key factor. Solid state is dramatically lower latency than HDDs were, while DRAM latency in absolute terms has been pretty constant for a long time. So even if you're doing something very demanding that works with large amounts of data relative to standard quantities of RAM (a situation that gets harder to come by,) having it all in RAM at the same time is much less important than back in the 90s/00s.

Dunno. Early nineties I had to shut down the X11 server to compile Linux on my 386 with 8MiB RAM, else the machine would thrash. Mid-nineties on a 486 with 16MiB Linux compiled happily in the background while the host remained usable, including GUI (might also have been due to then still rapid improvements in Linux itself).

Now my 8GiB Apple mini feels overworked and swaps a lot (quite noticeable so due to the spinning rust drive), while my laptop with 32GiB never breaks a sweat.

The real jump was when finally leaving behind my 8bit home computer (upgraded to 64+256KiB RAM of which most were usable only as RAM disk) when I got the 386 with 4MiB (soon maxed out at 8MiB). Now, that was a game changer.

Yeah, the equivalent nowadays would be like going from 256mb to 16gb.

Even most AAA games will still run on 8gb ram just fine.

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