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Try 10 MB.

And I still have it.

The first HD I as able to use was 5MB, on a MS-DOS based TI computer that, at the time, was a viable MS-DOS alternative to the IBM PC. (The HD alone was $1,500, and that was maybe 30 years ago!) Needless to say, we did not choose well, and that HD is long gone.
 
My first computer had a tape deck. Winning :rolleyes:

Well now that depends. Are you talking about a computer like the ADAM home computer, or more like an IBM PC 8086 (that had a tape deck port)?

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The first HD I as able to use was 5MB, on a MS-DOS based TI computer that, at the time, was a viable MS-DOS alternative to the IBM PC. (The HD alone was $1,500, and that was maybe 30 years ago!) Needless to say, we did not choose well, and that HD is long gone.

An old MFM HD? I had a hard card that I placed in an IDE slot in a Leading Edge 8086. I can't remember if it was 5 megs, or 10....
 
Oh please. No one will ever need more than 640 KB of RAM.

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Young'un. Mine was 40 MB. And I'm sure there's lots of people here who can beat that by a lot.

My first computer didn't have a drive at all. If I wanted to run a program, I first typed in all the code from some printed source such as Byte magazine, did troubleshooting to fix all the typos, and then ran it. If someone then turned off the computer, it was gone.

My second computer, thankfully, had a cassette tape drive so I could save programs that I typed into the computer. It's capacity was 100kB per side.

Good times.
 
Most people will never need that much RAM.

People have been saying that exact same statement for decades. Yet, people's expectations of computers evolve and software has to be written to meet those expectations. Inevitably, software that's written ten years from now will require more processing power and RAM than the software we have today.
 
The first HD I as able to use was 5MB, on a MS-DOS based TI computer that, at the time, was a viable MS-DOS alternative to the IBM PC. (The HD alone was $1,500, and that was maybe 30 years ago!) Needless to say, we did not choose well, and that HD is long gone.

Yeah, I remember that TI computer. It wasn't quite compatible with the IBM PC, so you generally had to buy software specifically for it. I considered it, but then Compaq came out with what was dubbed a 99-44/100% compatible clone (a reference to the purity of Ivory soap).

Compaq was the first to develop a "clean", but compatible BIOS without referring to IBM documentation: the developers were isolated from testers, who would tell them whether their BIOS matched the behavior of the IBM BIOS -- and they iterated until the Compaq could run MS-DOS applications for the IBM PC. So, they didn't have to license an IBM BIOS from IBM.

Compaq invested in a new company (Conner Peripherals, after merging with CoData), who developed what I believe was the first 3-1/2 drive. It was 10MB, and that's what was put in the first Compaq luggable PC-XT clone. It was shock-mounted with huge rubber bumpers, inside a metal frame that was the same size as a 5-1/4 drive.

The price for the Compaq hard drive upgrade was about $1,500 as well -- which included the controller card that filled a full ISA bus slot. $1,500 in 1983 is worth about $3,600 today:

http://www.dollartimes.com/calculators/inflation.htm

My Compaq luggable is in storage. I haven't turned it on for a few years, but the last time it powered up to the C:\> prompt.
 
This makes me now feel old - my first PC had two floppy drives, when I got a new one a few years later I got generous 20MB drive (at the time everybody had 10MB hard drives and they called be crazy for getting such an enormous hard drive). System memory was almost not existing :-(

My first Apple ][ came with Lemonade on a cassette.
 
Oh please. No one will ever need more than 640 KB of RAM.

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Young'un. Mine was 40 MB. And I'm sure there's lots of people here who can beat that by a lot.

Mine was 42MB in an Olivetti 286 16MHz with I believe 1MB of RAM. That box was sweet, because those extra 2 usable MB actually meant something, and most 286s were 16MHz. That wasn't my first computer, but it was the first one I went online with in the first few years of the 1990s. Woot. :)
 
Oh please. No one will ever need more than 640 KB of RAM.

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Young'un. Mine was 40 MB. And I'm sure there's lots of people here who can beat that by a lot.

The Mac Classic I have in my room maxed out at 4MB of ram. I don't know how much is inside it, but not more than that presumably. :p

p.s. People here seem to be confusing RAM and hard drive space. Get it straight people! We're talking RAM here!
 
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  • Film editors working in 4K+
  • Motion graphic designers
  • 3D animators
  • CAD designers

[*] Don't forget running simulations! There's never enough RAM for that - engineering simulations, architectural simulations, physics simulations... Being able to fit everything in RAM makes programming so much easier.

[*] Also any form of database analysis - and while you wouldn't likely use a Mac Pro in a server farm, you would use it for analysis....

We still can't believe that Windows 7 is limited to 192GB DRAM when you can go to Tyan and easily throw together a Linux system with 512GB.
 
Um...what? I'm a little confused. Most people will never need that much RAM. You might as well ask when everyone will have a Formula 1 car parked in their garage.

LOL! "Never need that much RAM..." That's what we thought when we were using 128KB machines like the //c and then we thought the same thing when the IIsi came out with it's 64MB capability. We always think wow we wont need any more thsi or that but somehow we always manage to push things to their limits.
 
LOL! "Never need that much RAM..." That's what we thought when we were using 128KB machines like the //c and then we thought the same thing when the IIsi came out with it's 64MB capability. We always think wow we wont need any more thsi or that but somehow we always manage to push things to their limits.

Imagine how much RAM holographic gaming would take up. I suspect that someday we'll truly run out of practical applications for more RAM, but we're certainly not there yet!
 
1 million.... err.... 100 billion dollars.

The upgrade prices are not actually bad at all the new Mac Pro becomes more competitive the more you add. The base models at 3 and 4k dollars are expensive but when you add the best graphic options and ram they compete and in some cases blow away the PC competition. Even the 3k version beats mos pcs at 4k video
 
Um...what? I'm a little confused. Most people will never need that much RAM. You might as well ask when everyone will have a Formula 1 car parked in their garage.

I wouldn't say never. Most probably never thought they'd need more than 18 Megabytes of ram in an Amiga back in the early '90s (i.e. max amount an A3000 could add without expansion). Well, technology and 3D virtual realities are just going to keep moving upward and soon (within 10-15 years), 128GB of ram will seem like a piddly nothing in a machine that is 300x faster with graphics capable of rendering real-life quality 3D. Most of the people NOW that need that kind of memory are either doing 3D or real-time video editing.

And this idea that the Mac Pro is a "Pro" machine and doesn't belong in the home is onerous. In the mid-90s, it was COMMON for a decent home computer to cost $2500-3000. People are spoiled by low-priced crap these days. Yeah, you could still get an Amiga 500 in the mid-90s for around $400-500. So what? A fast machine cost more like $3000+. The same is true today. You want 12 cores? You have to pay for them. Whether you "need" them is neither here nor there. Some people simply like to have fast things (whether cars or computers, what's the difference?) regardless if they use them to maximum capability.
 
I think you might be close. The ZX81 was first released in the UK in 1981. I have one of the first Compaq "luggables", which I bought in 1983. It had two floppy drives, which I upgraded by adding a 10 MB hard drive the next year.

In 2014 dollars, it cost me about $12,000 (including the upgrade). But, that included a whopping 512K of RAM.

Atari 400. Programmes in BASIC. 1980

CPU: MOS 6502,1.8MHz
RAM: 8K base, 48K max
Storage: external floppy drive
cassette recorder
OS: Atari OS

Then a 1980 upgrade to an Atari 800 - much better ! http://oldcomputers.net/atari800.html
 
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Really, who needs 128GB of RAM?

Video editing and number crunchin like 3-d modeling or CAD can take as much as you got to give it. Once you page to disk things take 100x as long due to processing files in parts. Remember this thing is intended to do higher than 4k cinema processing in close to real time.

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Imagine how much RAM holographic gaming would take up. I suspect that someday we'll truly run out of practical applications for more RAM, but we're certainly not there yet!

We need enough ram to model the university so we can prove its modeling us!
 
nobody can tell you that. it's entirely dependent on what you do w/ the gear. my previous iMac served me for 6 years, as has my current macbook pro. to me, upgrading machines every other year sounds crazy.


This is why I want a Mac Pro. I don't need 128GB today. But in five years? Maybe—and probably for less than $150 by then. My MBP in 2008 had 2GB of ram and my current rMBP has 16GB. Though I rarely hit a limit with 16GB. The limit I hit fairly often is the 512GB of SSD. I think someday RAM and SSD will be one in the same.

Tell me if and why I'm wrong: I'm thinking the Mac Pro could be my key to not doing upgrades every two years. With upgrades to 12 cores, upgradeable video card, upgrades to 128GB of ram and Thunderbolt 2.0 storage I could probably get 6-7 years out of it. 64-bit multi-core Geekbench score for the baseline late 2013 Mac Pro is 14426, while the top-end early 2009 Mac Pro beats it handily at 17795. If Apple waits until 2015 to update the Mac Pro again, the new baseline will probably be near that score around 18000. That will be around 6 years. So if you bought the 2009 Mac Pro at a base configuration (Geekbench 8075), and then upgraded to 8-core and more (17795) later when it became cheaper, you could do as well (in theory) as a baseline 2015 Mac Pro. Those of you who have upgraded older Mac Pros, please tell me if my logic is flawed. Can you go from bottom to top-end through upgrades alone over the course of several years without spending as much? Or is it better to just sell your machine every few years? I hate dealing with Craigslist, but it has worked for me in the past. It's just always stressful—especially for such a pricey item. I don't need the top-end Mac Pro, but I do a lot of work that could benefit from a higher-end machine with a large, pixel-dense display, such as editing lots of photos, Photoshop work, web design, lots of multitasking, testing websites in IE in a virtual machine, and some video editing (720p and 1080p). I'm going to be purchasing the successor to the 5D MkIII when it comes out, so those files will probably be huge. Especially if they increase the dynamic range and megapixel count. So a low-end Mac Pro with 4K seems like a good idea. But will it last for a long time through upgrades?
 
RAM amounts will continue to grow as long as Moore's Law holds true. By 2020 you'll like as not be able to build a computer with a terabyte of RAM !!
 
Really, who needs 128GB of RAM?

I have 32 GB of RAM in my late 2009 27 inch iMac, and I'm using 25.8 GB at the moment. I'm not using any memory intensive applications either (other than Safari, but it can do with less). It's just nice not to worry about touching Swap memory. Now, that Mavericks can compress memory, I rarely see that happening as well.

The more memory you have, the more OS X will use, and this easily applies to over 16 GB, even if 4-8 GB would have worked ok. Everything just runs a little faster when OS X doesn't have to manage or juggle memory for limited space.
 
My first computer as well.. no floppy drive, cassette (and cartridge slot) only. :)

All Apple after that though.... But fluke event that came to have the Atari and things would be very different had that fluke not occurred including less likelihood what all came next.

Anyway - so much capability in today's technology that allows so much bloat to be gotten away with.

Atari 400. Programmes in BASIC. 1980

CPU: MOS 6502,1.8MHz
RAM: 8K base, 48K max
Storage: external floppy drive
cassette recorder
OS: Atari OS

Then a 1980 upgrade to an Atari 800 - much better ! http://oldcomputers.net/atari800.html
 
7 years might be a stretch. 5 years would be very possible. Ultimately I think you'll find the hardware holds up quite well. How long you can go without an upgrade will probably be dependent on Apple's software support.

I'm typing this on a 6-year-old MacBook Pro that is in nice shape, works perfectly and runs the latest Apple software and other things I want to do with it – no particular reason to upgrade right now.

I would be surprised if one couldn't get at least that many years out of a desktop Mac that's of a totally different calibre.

And yeah, count me also into those people who think getting a new computer every two years is crazy.
 
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