Hacker News Reader

Comment by mschaef | Hacker News Reader

> I had to use it to do image processing on a 256MB image buffer back in the 1980s in assembly language.... Give me a flat 32 bit memory address space any day (e.g. MC68000 around the same time.)

Huh?

There were no segmented x86 machines capable of addressing 256MB of RAM, aside from the 386 (maybe).

If you had a 386 and the $130K of memory your statement implies, you probably also could afford a Unix (or something else) license to get to that 32-bit address space. (If you weren't doing it all in memory, then you're having to depending on paging stuff out to disk, implying you either have a real OS or a flat memory model isn't enough to save you since you're manually having to page stuff to disk and back anyway.)

That's a super strange scenario you're describing.

View on HN

Probably talking about swapping it in from some external datastore. These days you would open the file and dump it into a single buffer and rip across it, and not even really stress about it. Even 256 meg of hard drive. That would have been impressively expensive in the 80s.

Back then you had to chunk it out and fiddle with the offsets. Even then you still would have had to manage loading out the next chunk.

If my memory is right 1MB of memory in the early 90s was like 200-300 per meg. Would have to dig up a computer shopper and look.

> Even 256 meg of hard drive. That would have been impressively expensive in the 80s.

I only have a couple reference points around this scale:

My dad's company had a system set up with a searchable index of a bunch of legal testimony. It was a Compaq Deskpro 386 running Unix with an attached 1GB disk. The 1GB disk set up was as big as the machine itself.

A few years later, I worked with a Cyber mainframe equipped with around 30GB of total attached disk storage. The disk array literally filled a room.

256MB disk on an 80's PC would have definitely been quite a bit.

I remember my dad bought a 500MB hard drive for our Apple IIgs. It cost like $500-600 as I recall, not cheap by any means. I remember thinking that no way would we ever fill it up - which, to be fair, we never did. 500MB would fill up instantly now, but programs and data were so much smaller back then that it lasted until the computer eventually stopped being used.

Perhaps they meant KB?

That would make more sense. I was trying to imagine what sort of (custom?) hardware would accommodate that amount of memory back then. That was large storage even for mainframes the time. (The Cray 2 in the mid-1980's had 2GB, which was considered notably large.)

Yes, mental typo. 256KB.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com