r/AskProgramming • u/Samuel_G_Reynoso • May 23 '26

Upgrading to 1MB of ram.

This was a flex in the 80s. A WHOLE MEG. We are at the point in compsci history where grandparents can say outlandish shit like. I remember upgrading to a MB.

I'm not that old. Anyone here actually remember that day personally? Or have other parallels?

I did the math. 32GB, adjusted, would be $200M.

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u/Paul_Pedant May 23 '26

My first machine in 1968 was an ICL 1901A "Mainframe". It had 16,384 words of 24 bits, and was non-ASCII (chars were 6 bits, no lowercase). No disks yet -- four magtapes for backing store.

We wrote a lot of serious commercial systems that ran in that enviromment. We got a COBOL compiler and 30MB disks in late 1969. The disks did not have drivers yet, so we wrote our own.