lokijuhyhui

my first PC going to college in 1988, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PPC_512 4.7Mhz, 512kb RAM and a floppy drive, it could run a fortran compiler (rather slowly)

Although if you had access to a TV and a power socket at the destination my Sinclair QL was probably a more capable and lighter 'portable'

It's great until you need to allocate 3.9Gb of vector on a 32bit machine.

Somebody said computer science is solving yesterdays problems on tomorrows hardware, the rest of science is solving tomorrows problems on yesterdays hardware

same thing we used to do on supercomputers, allocating memory is very expensive and surprisingly limited.

You also don't want your code to fail after weeks of runtime with an alloc error, if it's going to run out of memory you want it to fail at the start.