• flubba86@lemmy.world
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    7 hours ago

    Can someone explain to me why it always seems like everyone on lemmy are in one of these two categories:

    1: “I remember my first computer used ferro-magnetic beads that we glued to lengths of string. We could store nearly 10 bytes in one string”.

    2: “My first computer was an old iPad that only had 64GB storage, couldn’t even store my photo album.”

    It’s like everyone is aged either 89 or 19, nobody in between.

    • BCsven@lemmy.ca
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      16 minutes ago

      Lol. Mine was a tape drive, then 360kb diskette. But even today I have a OpenMediaVault server with 256MB of memory and its fine for audio and 720p streaming. The key is software optimization…which Windows seems bad at.

  • Melatonin@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    6 hours ago

    My first computer, an Atari 520ST, came standard with 196K of ROM and 512K of RAM. The OS (GEM) was on a dedicated chip. Everything was run off floppy disks.

  • huquad@lemmy.ml
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    1 day ago

    In university, they stopped giving out software licenses for personal machines in favor of letting students connect to virtual machines they hosted. They allocated 8GB of RAM which wasn’t horrible at the time, but they only allocated 4GB of storage. Only time I’ve ever seen that ratio.

    • flubba86@lemmy.world
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      8 hours ago

      Probably because the RAM was pooled, but storage was not. So your RAM allocation is part of a larger pool that is shared between all currently logged in users. But your storage is allocated/reserved up front, and is used only by you.

      • huquad@lemmy.ml
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        5 hours ago

        That makes sense. They also pushed us to store everything on the cloud.

    • AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world
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      13 minutes ago

      The demo scene is still around, although it’s maybe less popular. That was a demo scene thing, not a commercial game.

      Also, iirc, it was very heavy on performance for the time because the procedural textures were so expensive.

      • Zerush@lemmy.ml
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        42 seconds ago

        I know, but I played iit on it’s release in 2005 on the old PC these years without problems. Even if it is an 10 minutes game, its a marvel to put it with good graphics, sound and music in only 96 KB, even some avatars here have more. It still works in current Windows.

  • comfy@lemmy.ml
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    2 days ago

    Since when was 8GB RAM, let alone 8GB VRAM, a problem? Are you running ML models, video editing or some special games?? Or some weird poorly-written thing like Windows OS?

    • AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world
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      11 minutes ago

      Modern AAA games above 1440p and high settings usually can use that much VRAM.

      8gb of ram is also not enough for anything particularly heavy.

    • SoulWager@lemmy.ml
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      5 hours ago

      Software is a gas, it expands to use all available resources.

      I have 32GB of RAM, and run out occasionally. At the moment I have two CAD programs, thousands of pages of datasheets and reference manuals, an IDE, and ~50 browser tabs open. I don’t HAVE to have them all open at once, but it does save me a lot of time.

      My next machine will have 128GB, and I expect that will run out of memory too.

      Also, sometimes you need to use software that has a memory leak, so a bit of extra RAM gives you some more time before it crashes.

      Photogrammetry can also get resource hungry.

        • ProfessorOwl_PhD [any]@hexbear.net
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          9 hours ago

          Run new games at 144fps at maxed settings in native 4k, which as we all know is completely necessary and extremely distinguishable from 60fps at medium settings with upscaling.

        • WereCat@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          Playing new games at high settings. The card often does have raw performance to handle it but due to lack of VRAM results in terrible framerate or lack of detail

  • Dyskolos@lemmy.zip
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    2 days ago

    I remember my first 20MB HDD. Imagined it would be impossible to ever fill this gargantuan hog. Well…

    • HiddenLayer555@lemmy.mlOP
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      2 days ago

      I’m young enough that the first “computer” I ever owned in my childhood was the first generation iPad. 64 GB felt huge back then and was a pretty big deal for solid state storage for the time.

      I then got a junker Windows XP computer mainly because the iPad didn’t let me mess around with the OS nearly as much as I wanted. Learned to program on that old computer using the iPad for online tutorials. But the hard drive was only 40 GB and it blew kid me’s mind the difference in size between the single chip of the iPad and the metal brick of the hard drive, yet the hard drive has less storage.

      • AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world
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        7 minutes ago

        It is pretty insane how dense storage can get. Some companies have showcased 4tb micro SD cards and you can buy a 2tb one right now.

      • Dyskolos@lemmy.zip
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        2 days ago

        Lol…that is still a thing that amazes me up to today. My watch now has more ram than my first 10 computers had combined with ram and HDD 😁

  • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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    2 days ago

    I fondly remember having 8 GB of storage, because I could back up my hard drive on like two dollars worth of CD-Rs.

    I feared no virus. Reinstalling XP was a monthly affair regardless.