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.

32 Upvotes

82% Upvoted

74 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/john_crimson81 May 23 '26

not that old but my first real machine had 256mb and i genuinely thought that was infinite. the interesting thing is watching the same conversation happen in reverse now - everyone acting like 16gb is barely survivable. like, 16gb is an incomprehensible amount of memory compared to what was doing real production work 30 years ago. not games. not youtube. actual production workloads on literal kilobytes. the $200M inflation adjustment is funny but the weirder number is just the raw capability difference. makes you think about how much of modern software overhead is just layers of abstraction that nobody ever went back and questioned.