Quarter Life Crisis

The world according to Sven-S. Porst

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More memory

453 words

Some geek said that 640KB of memory would be enough for everyone. That was probably in the 1980s. Of course he was wrong. The amount of RAM that is in computers has exploded since I started using them. In fact, it probably hasn't exploded but just made an effort to fit into Moore's law scales – from 1MB in my Atari ST at the end of the 1980s to 640MB in my current Powerbook.

But while the number of transistors in a modern processor is more like a theoretical number and their doubling doesn't mean much (to me at least), this is quite different for RAM. It's much more tangible: A page of text contains around 3000 characters. Even if we're generous and use 4-byte Unicode encoding, this amounts to 12KB per page. I.e. more than 80 pages of text on my old Atari and more than 50000 on my current Powerbook. That's probably the order of magnitude of letters in an encyclopaedia.

And while we use our computers for more things today than we did a decade ago, the amount of data hasn't multiplied similarly. Rather, the additional memory has been used for creature comforts, fancy icons and otherwise lickable graphics. This probably isn't surprising as the same is true for the increased processing power.

And I like lickable graphics, so I won't complain. I won't be saying that having 640MB of RAM just to read my e-mail, use TeX, write some rants and keep my files neatly arranged is freaking ridiculous. I'll rather say that it obviously isn't enough. Perhaps I rather wan 640GB of RAM or some number in between. Why?

Well, my impression is that most of the delays I experience on my computer aren't related to it being slow in processing data, but rather it it not having the eye candy it wants to show me handy when it needs it. Everybody who experienced the irritating one second delay between trashing something in the OSX Finder oder 'Poofing' something from the Dock and the sound that is supposed accompany these actions, knows what I am talking about.

There seem to be two ways out of this: One would be waiting for programmers to improve things in a way that there is truely clever caching of data, making sure that all the pretty icons and sounds are available the very instant they are needed. As this would require programmers doing something that is non-trivial, clever and actually working the way it's supposed to, I'll not keep my breath and put my bets on plan B: Just give us enough memory that we store everything we need in there, that we can scrap the whole swapping thing and so on...

May 23, 2004, 20:29

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