Compared to my 1st computer's memory ...
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Compared to my 1st computer's memory ...
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- By the end of 2026, how useful do you think agentic/multi-agent AI systems will actually be in your daily work or personal projects? Posted on March 11th, 2026 | 10852 votes
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- By the end of 2026, how useful do you think agentic/multi-agent AI systems will actually be in your daily work or personal projects? Posted on March 11th, 2026 | 40 comments
Missing alternative (Score:5, Interesting)
> 1 million times.
First computer was a ZX80 with 1k of RAM, current has 16GB...
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This reminded me that I haven't gotten around to swapping out the other 4gb card for the 16gb card, which will bring me to 32... ...because since I haven't been trying to get multiple connected soft body simulations to work without being ridiculously unstable, I really haven't needed the extra ram.
And then I read the last couple of sentences and laugh, remembering being a hacker kid in the early eighties.
Re:Missing alternative (Score:5, Insightful)
So where's the 6,250 choice (640K -> 4G)? The 12,500 choice? The 25,000 choice (640K -> 16G)? But, I see we have a few dinosaurs out there on the list who actually had Z80s! Thanks for making me feel young again!
But maybe the questions should have used ranges or a greater than/ less than qualifier?
Come on, this is supposed to be a Geek site! Be precise and pedantic for God's sake. Or at least for Quantum's sake.
Re:Missing alternative (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Missing alternative (Score:5, Insightful)
oddly enough, I have more of a need for RAM in my phone than my desktop.
But if you want a good laugh, flex your google-fu and compare your phone's memory and processing capacity to that of NASA's Mission Control center when we launched Apollo 11. -- Not the lunar lander (that is outclassed by modern parking meters), I mean the Mission Control mainframe back on earth.
That really drives home how crazy the whole "moon by the end of the 60's" thing was; and how amazing the success truly was.
Re: Missing alternative (Score:4, Insightful)
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Well, I think this illustrates that computing power is not that crucial of a factor in moon missions. There have been many technological advances in the years, but FLOPS clearly isn't what makes going to the moon hard.
Re: Missing alternative (Score:5, Funny)
Because it's damn cold there, and the sentient liquid He beings there would destroy you...
Re: Missing alternative (Score:4, Interesting)
"...everything else also should have advanced at a similar rate." False premise. Different technologies advance at different rates, largely driven by demand and profit motive.
Intel is not a government agency with a confused budget, mission and goals that change with each election. Intel always knows that it exists to make money. It expects to do it by continuously offering more function at reduced cost to a broader set of expanding markets. NASA is a government agency whose customers are the few politicians that control their budget.
There's hope. NASA is steadily releasing its space monopoly yet, seeding the world with expert space knowledge while contributing to demand for space services. It's necessary for the economic development of space. It will evolve into a pure science and regulatory agency by dropping routine launch-services, exploration missions and placing more emphasis on X-Prize competitions and developing regulations promoting and governing private-sector access to space. Expect rapid space-tech engineering (engineering, not science) and commercial development by investor-financed space companies focused on communications, transportation logistics, mining. At a more mature market stage, expect competition to drive steady Intel-like advances, creating new markets and techniques for space logistics companies. (Air-launch, elevator delivery from Earth, ballistic shipments of space commodities to logistics outposts in deep space) Expect deliveries of space-hydrocarbons, financed by specific futures contracts traded on the stock market.
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Has engine power increased by 1 000 000 times over the past 30 years? No. Because the fuel energy density, maximum practical thrust and maximum safe payload are bound by the fundamental laws of physics. The challenges of reaching escape velocity have not changed much.
CPUs still have some way to go until they become entirely bound by physics.
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Moore's Law is not a fundamental principle of physics that applies to every phenomenon in the universe. The human lifespan doesn't double every 24 months, crop production doesn't double every 24 months, the speed of light doesn't double every 24 months, etc. It was an extrapolation that applies to a particular phase in the development of a particular technology. Not to interplanetary propulsion.
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My phone does too.
oddly enough, I have more of a need for RAM in my phone than my desktop.
i dont find that odd at all...lets face it we are all using our phones as our primary computing device these days...why not the high end ones easily handle 80% of our daily computing needs.
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> 1 million times
But that option's not missing - it's the 2nd last one.
"First" computer? (Score:3)
Do they mean the first one I owned, or the first one I controlled (at work)?
If it's the first one I owned, then I'm only at the 10,000+ level. I had a PC-clone with 640KB, now I have two laptops with 16GB each, or 25,000 times as much, one at home and the other at work.
If it's the first one I controlled, then I'm at the 1,000,000+ level. It was a PDP-8 with 4K of 12-bit words (=6KB), so the current stuff is 2,600,000 times as much.
Re:Missing alternative (Score:4, Interesting)
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Mine was a ZX-81 with 1KB RAM and my current one has 8388608 times more RAM. (The numbers given in the alternatives really suck.)
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Of course, even before that processor was outdated I was filling up 4K regularly. - SO I made extensive use of the cassette-tape backup.
Imagine if memory was still 2.5 cents per byte.
Re:Missing alternative (Score:5, Insightful)
The other difference between the 4k TRS-80 and the 16k one (apart from the RAM, and the price) was that the bigger one came with a better BASIC:
TRS-80 Model 1 level 1 (4k)
10 P. "HELLO WORLD"
20 G. 10
TRS-80 Model 1 Level 2 (16k)
10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
20 GOTO 10
Not having to de-code the ultra-short keywords made for much more readable progams.
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Also remember that accessing that massive 16k of RAM slowed the machine down quite a lot.
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In the end my VIC-20 had 3K.
I've had this signature for a while:
Re: Missing alternative (Score:3)
My Vic-20 had 3.5K of RAM
Alternatively just missing the eighties (Score:3)
And Sinclair's 16K was a p
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Same here. 1k to 12GB. Good thing the BASIC interpreter was in ROM! To get more out of it I ended up programming it in Forth and expanding it to 16k.
Did you have to assemble yours from components or did it come pre-built?
Re:Missing alternative (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Missing alternative (Score:4, Funny)
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The Sym-1 had 256 bytes.
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I'm in the same boat as you.
My first was a 4KB TRS-80. (Before it was a Model 1. Before there were any other models.)
My current machine is also 16 GB. That's 4x10^6 times more RAM. But I picked the ;gt;1,000,000 option, since it was the closest without going over.
Moore's Law is pretty awesome.
TRS-80 to Retina Macbook (Score:2)
TRS-80 Model1, Level 1 Basic, 4K of ram to a 16 Gig Retina Macbook pro.
4,194,304 times as much.
-db
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This.
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No 512 option? (Score:5, Insightful)
I find it odd that powers of 10 were chosen instead of powers of 2. Nearly all memory multiples would be powers of 2, and certainly very few would be powers of 10.
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Exactness would require too many options, you'd need 2^7, personally I'd need 2^18 and another comment here was 2^24 - all 25 from 2^0 and maybe beyond would be right for some. I think there's a limit of seven-eight poll options, so you'd have to do approximations anyway. I went with 100000, too bad I didn't go for an 8x8GB X79 board or I could have picked the real dinosaur option.
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It doesn't even say "greater than", and the chance of having an exact decimal multiple of your original computer is pretty slim. The whole thing is half-arsed, but it wouldn't be a Slashdot poll if it were competent. I'm not complaining, moaning about the options is part of the fun.
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2^10 = 1024 which is pretty close to 10^3. You can use that approximation to ballpark figures in the base-10 that most people understand.
2^10 ~= 10^3 = a thousand = k
2^20 ~= 10^6 = a million = M
2^30 ~= 10^9 = a billion = G.
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I don't think you understand your own joke...
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What's not to understand? 10 binary = 2 (base10), i.e., those who understand and those who don't. What I don't understand is your post.
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What's not to understand? 10 binary = 2 (base10), i.e., those who understand and those who don't. What I don't understand is your post.
Now parse the logic of the original sentence. There's 1 type of person who can't read binary and 1 that can....
Seems like there's really 11 types of people in the world....
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dear god people stop wasting your life!
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*most* of the options.
Bender: I think I saw a two.
Fry: Relax Bender... there's no such thing as two..
???? no cats here, damn slashcode. (Score:2)
Where's the, "I'm old and I've forgotten" option? My first computer (mine as in, I was the only one who used it) had a 512MB HD. RAM? No idea. My second computer probably had between 128MB and 256MB of RAM (I guess, based on the time period). My third computer started with 512MB of RAM, and a tiny 40GB HD. Both got upgraded. My current computer has a tiny 512GB HD, but will be upgraded soon enough. RAM is a ridiculously large 16GB. I don't think I've ever used more than 5GB since I bought the thing. The Sys
If you had a hard drive, you aren't old (Score:5, Insightful)
If your memory was measured in MB, you aren't old.
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Haha. There are multiple responses to that:
1) I didn't get my first computer until I was already 'old', and I'm now even older. (Replace 'old' with 'middle-aged' as preferred.)
1a) Perhaps because I just didn't realize how important they would become.
1b) Or I couldn't afford one.
1c) Or I lived in a place where they just weren't available (see also 1b, but realize that in some parts of the world didn't get TV until the 1980s, and some parts of the world still don't have access to over-
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Not every one was rich enough to own a computer when they were young. Even primitive machines with no RAM to speak of were expensive back in the day.
The first machine I wanted to buy but couldn't was $800 back when that was real money.
The first consumer machine to have as much as a whole Meg debuted in the mid 80s for $1000.
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And if my dad posted to slashdot it'd be "If your computer was made with transistors, you're not old". Vacuum tubes FTW.
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If your first computer had a hard drive (and one with half a gig), you're DEFINITELY not old.
Indeed... I remember salivating over a tape drive, but I couldn't afford it. At least what I had was better than my father's first computer -- it took up an entire research building and used punch cards. A separate building pumped out the vacuum tubes to replace the failed ones during the daily service window. Unfortunately, this meant that you couldn't run a job that took longer than 20 hours, but instead had to batch your operations into chunks so that you could take the output from one session, analyz
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The second computer I had was the first with a hard drive (40MB!), and I'm not old...
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I remember those 40 MB hard disks. That was around the time Stacker and Doublespace were successful.
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Sounds plausible. Probably 4MB, along with the crappy 486 processor (1992 or 1993 vintage I guess).
The computer before that (not mine), had something like 4MB HD. Crazy times. The computer before that (not mine) had two floppy discs, and no HD.
And to think I can still play Sopwith (1985 version) on my current laptop. Though if I want to do that I need to work out how to slow down DOSBox.
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Yeah, i remember i upgraded my first notebook (a Digital HiNote, with a 486sx processor) to 12MB RAM (in about 1995).
But i remember around that time, too, some computers still using 256kB and, maybe 512kB RAM SIMMs. 286s and PCs i think. And even hard drives in the sub-1MB range (MFM and RLL, anyone?)
HP-2100 mini computer to SchtinkPad W520 (Score:2)
"A few crumbs" of memory on the HP. You could access and modify it with light switches on the front panel. So you could mess with the time-sharing BASIC on it, and replace the save with the scratch command, for when the teacher went on it.
32Gig on the SchtinkPad. I'm not going to fish through all that memory.
Swapping or paging? What's that . . . ?
Rounded down a little to 10,000x (Score:2)
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Commodore 64 to Self Built 4GB (Score:2)
So, my first computer had 65,536 bytes of RAM and my current computer has (65,536 bytes x 65,536) bytes of RAM.
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Damn it.. I missed that I put the ) in the wrong place.
So, basically, "How old are you?" (Score:5, Insightful)
Something like: 7*log10(Ratio)+10 = your age +/-5 years?
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Something like: 7*log10(Ratio)+10 = your age +/-5 years?
Yeah, really! If I compare my phone to my 1st computer, I'm at the higher end of this list!
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Mine came out to about 7 * log10(64kb/16gb) ~ 37, so it works without the +10. but I'm counting since my family's apple IIe at age 8. Still, fine work, sir!
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Mine came out to about 7 * log10(64kb/16gb) ~ 37, so it works without the +10. but I'm counting since my family's apple IIe at age 8. Still, fine work, sir!
I think to improve precision, the constant adder should probably be adjusted by the age difference between one's oldest sibling and also take into account relative prosperity of your childhood family. Maybe throw in something to reflect parents' occupations. But by then it starts looking like the IEEE salary curve-fit model, which IIRC had about eleventy-thousand variables.
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7 * log10(2048) + 10 = 33.179 (I'll be 30 in November)
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See a comment further up the page.
Someone may not have got a computer until the 1990's but may already have been 50 when they did.
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See a comment further up the page. Someone may not have got a computer until the 1990's but may already have been 50 when they did.
I guess I should have included the disclaimer that my formula -- like Slashdot polls, horoscopes and psychic readings -- is for entertainment purposes only. One should not use their computed age for purposes such as registering for Social Security, Medicare or the Draft. Consult your birth certificate for these purposes.
On a slightly more serious note, if one's childhood ended before the era of the home computer, the assumptions I made are not valid, and the age estimate will be even more inaccurate than it
TI 99/4A to 8GB PC (Score:2)
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The memory expansion modules that plugged into the side of the console connected to the CPU's memory bus. I heard that BASIC programs and other software ran a lot faster if you had a memory e
64k (Score:2)
First computer was a Franklin ACE 1200 with 64k. My PC at home has 16GB so about 250,000 times as much memory. they could have ranges instead of static values, like 10 to 100 times 100 to 1000 times etc.
My first computer (Score:2)
Compukit UK101 with optional memory expansion giving it a massive total 4K of RAM (including video ram).
Long live the super micro (Score:2)
The first computer that I bought was a Charles River Data Systems 68/35F with 512 kB RAM and a 1 MB add in board. The first ones I used were via punched cards taken by my CS teacher from my high school to the college - one run per day! I don't have any idea how much memory was available on that system. You learned how to program when you just got one run per day.
Current systems run roughly 5,000 to 10,000 times the CRDS but it served the basic functions I needed. All the fluff added later just makes it ni
"My" computer? (Score:2)
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Sinclair programmable calculator. (Score:2)
I had one in '76, but don't remember how much memory it had.
First computer was a family computer (Score:2)
Does ROM count? (Score:2)
I had Hayden's Stimulating Simulations and a big pile of magazines to copy programs out of. That's pretty much like ROM.
Love my C64 (Score:2)
64K RAM SYSTEM 38,911 BASIC BYTES FREE
I still don't know what ever came over me about 15 years ago when my wife asked if she could donate it to goodwill and I agreed... I had a couple of 1541s, a tape drive, crappy MPS801 printer, a 1702 monitor, and hunders of floppies with games of all kinds - even a few legal ones! ;)
3072 times: 4 MB vs 12 GB (Score:2)
Then (1995): An awful Compaq Presario CDS522. 4 MB RAM. 66 MHz Intel 486SX2 (that's right... no floating point unit). 270 MB HDD. 14" built-in monitor of questionable quality... I was so happy I finally got a computer. But the happiness quickly faded away as I began to realize how bad the computer was. Upgraded the memory over a year later with 16 MB to a whopping total of 20 MB but the system still sucked overall. I had to cope with it for two years until I managed to replace it with a newer computer.
Now:
I think I win this one (Score:2)
Age of Slashdot Readers (Score:2)
You can really easily guess the average of a Slashdot reader just looking at the results.
Atari VCS, anyone? (Score:2)
Does the Atari VCS (Video Computer System) count as my first computer? Because my 32GB desktop today would make that "computer's" 128 bytes of RAM look tiny. We'd need a "268,435,456 times as much" category for that comparison.
500,000x (Score:2)
My first computer was an Atari 600xl. It had 16k. My current computer is a Macbook Pro that has 8Gb.
Apple //e because the PC had no software (Score:2)
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640kB (Score:2)
1024 (Score:2)
My first modern computer, and the first one I purchased myself (a 75 MHz Pentium; used), had 8 MB RAM, though I installed another 16 before I even booted it the first time. I am currently sitting at my work laptop, which has 8 GB. So, that math is easy.
As a kid, I had a Tomy Tutor, which, according to Wikipedia, was similar to a TI-99/4A, which had 256 bytes of RAM -- one-quarter of a kilobyte. So 8GB, times 1024 MB per GB, times 1024 kB per MB, divided by one-quarter, equals... about 32 million times more?
Define "first computer"? (Score:2)
The first computer I "used" was my dad's 486. The first computer I really remember using is the school's Apple ][s.
The first computer I owned was an old-even-at-the-time Thinkpad, with a Mobile Pentium and (IIRC) 64MB of memory. That's the one I'm counting as "my first computer", which gives me a mere 192x improvement. Had I counted from the 486 or Apple ][, it would have increased to 100,000.
Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48k (Score:3)
So :)
scale=2
8*1024*1024/48
174762.66 times
More than 30,000,000 times (Score:4, Insightful)
It should be clear you've got the choices wrong when the mode is at one end. My first computer had 384 bytes of RAM. This one has 12GB.
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the poll is effectively just a disguised form of "how old are you?" -- slashdot is doing a surreptitious survey... the sneaks!
To a point. But some people may have an artificially low or high amount of ram in their current machine which would skew results.
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Re: Tandy 1000TL (Score:2)
It came standard with 512k but could be upgraded to 640k by inserting individual DIP RAM chips into sockets on the motherboard.
Of course the 1000TL had DOS 3.1 and Deskmate in ROM so you could decide to count that as well.
Tandy 1000SX (Score:2)
I had a similar one, but now that you mention it, I'm not sure how much it had. I know the video card had a graphics mode that could handle 16 colors in a higher resolution graphics modes, as opposed to most pc's that had only 4 colors and "palettes" at the time. Could they do HIMEM stuff, or am I confusing that with my first 386?
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I recall my parents' 1000SX had 640KB. That was the first computer I truly "used." I don't remember my dad's Altairs. The Tandy was good for word processing (Wordstar), flight simulators (MS, Their Finest Hour), turn-based strategy games (The Ancient Art of War), programming (GW-BASIC) and much else. What a great computer. The 1993 upgrade to a 486 DX2/66 was more drastic than any upgrade since.
Both my work desktop and home desktop have 8GB, so that makes it a 13,107.2:1 ratio for me, so I voted 10,000
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My Apple II had 16K. If yours had only 4K, what are you doing with a 7-digit UID?