J. Clarke wrote:
Doug Winterburn wrote:
Swingman wrote:
"Doug Winterburn" wrote

Maybe 2000 megs or 2 gigs?
Gigabytes ... mea culpa.

(still having a hard time thinking of RAM in the magnitude of
"gigabytes"). "Surely we'll never need more than 640K?"


The 360-40 mainframe I worked on in 1969 had a whopping 256KB. It
could run three partitions of apps under OS/360-MFT. The older 7094
had 32K of 36-bit oil-cooled magnetic core memory. Took a 55 gallon
drum of oil dumped into the memory and about 2-3 days with the
heaters running to get it up to temp so we could boot it.

And one of those machines could support a remarkable number of
simultaneous users.

You might want to check out http://www.jaymoseley.com/hercules/.

Yabbut, there's a huge difference between a black/green text terminal or
selectric typewriter terminal and today's GUIs as far as cycles and
memory usage. The typical modern PC sucks up close to a half gig in 32
bit address (4 gig max) space for video and drivers for a single user.