Daily Kos :: Diaries. Back in the old days, think mid 1980s, we had minicomputers, specifically a DEC VAX 11/780. An entire freshman computer science cohort at a major university would sit down at 9600 baud DEC VT 102 terminals, shoehorn themselves into a machine with one sixteenth the ram that my cell phone has, and internet access for the whole school was a single 56k circuit, about a quarter of what I get out of my cellular 3G network. My phone has a four gigabyte flash card, ten times the capacity of the 14” RA-81 drives that the minicomputer used.
Given that only sixteen meg of ram were available the system would have double or triple that amount of swap space configured on one of RA-81 drives. And when too many things were happening at once the system spent more time moving things back and forth from memory to hard disk, thusly getting no real work done despite being 100% utilized.
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