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Comment by brabel | Hacker News Reader

In 2006, if you tried to create an array with 2^30 elements you would just get an OutOfMemoryError almost anywhere.

AMD's 64b CPU were released in 2003, Intel followed up in 2004, and in 2006 launched their first 64b laptop chip (with Core 2). By then the ability to reasonably allocate more than 1GB in one shot was becoming quite widespread (the mid 2007 MBPs could be upgraded to 6GB RAM).

And obviously Google would have been dealing with servers, where it'd be even older as they'd probably have been using PAE and each process would be able to allocate and address a full 4GB.

Not sure if you're a troll... but for general info, in 2006 most desktop computers (laptops were still not so common) had something like 100MB of RAM if you were lucky. Maybe Google already had some huge machines with 1GB+ but that was not at all a common thing outside supercomputers.

I think you’re off by a decade or so.

Common consumer laptops had 2-4 GB of RAM in 2006.

https://everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook_pro/specs/macbook...

Just like today you can buy machines with 128GB of RAM... but that doesn't mean that's what people were using... a lot of people buy machines with 4GB today (just checked the most popular website in my country, lots of the offers only have 4GB: https://www.elgiganten.se/datorer-kontor/datorer/laptop).

I remember pretty clearly that if you had anywhere above 512MB of RAM in 2006 you had very much top-of-the-line.

> I remember pretty clearly that if you had anywhere above 512MB of RAM in 2006 you had very much top-of-the-line.

That’s a different claim than your original statement of having 100MB max.

I am so sorry for not being 100% accurate.

I don't mean to invalidate your experience, as computers and parts prices have varied a lot historically and geographically. My point was to give some context with what was then a decent laptop with the understanding that some setups might be even more high end, and that legacy systems would have lower specs, similar to what you mentioned.

You are not "not being 100% accurate", you are 100% inaccurate while accusing people of trolling.

Eh, 2006 was right on the cusp of the 32-bit/64-bit flip. 32-bit was still pretty common, but my first task at my first job that year was migrating a search app to compile as a 64-bit binary, for servers that had (I believe) 8GB. They were good-sized servers for the time, but not particularly exotic, commodity hardware at a startup.

The MacBook came out in 2006, it had 512MB. I suppose it could have contained an array of 2^30 bits, though that's unlikely to occur. The point is that most machines weren't going to run into this at the time it was published. I'd be curious to see how many machines would run into it today, single sets of that size just aren't that common.

> The MacBook came out in 2006, it had 512MB.

Apple released multiple different models in 2006, "early 2006" had either 512 or 1GB base (1GB for T2600, the 17" and the high-end 15) expandable to 2GB; and "late 2006" had 1GB to 2GB base expandable to 4.

The MacBook Pro I linked came out in 2006, and allows for 4GB, though there are some limitations to using all of it beyond 3GB.

You think Windows Vista ran on 100MB of RAM? I wish!

I was still on Windows 98 :D, that could easily run on 64MB.

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