Hindsight is 20/20
Posted by Jon Lee in Offtopic, tags: funny, hindsight, newsgroup, ramMy friend sent me this link to a newsgroup posting exactly a decade ago. One guy hypothesizes that one day computers will have gigabytes of memory, judging from the rapid increase of computing power at the time. Look at the response he gets!
: Scott Nudds wrote:: > No personal computer will ever have gigabytes of RAM, just as no
: > automobile has giga-gallon gas tanks.Kristian Thommesen …@daimi.aau.dk> wrote:: May I ask why not? – if the trend of my personal computers continuous,
: there’s a doubling of memory about each 2.5 years.Exponential growth is impossible to sustain for any appreciable
length of time as a practical matter. The fact that current growth is
exponential means that in short order we can expect it to abruptly halt.
But this is not the reason PC’s will never have gigabytes of RAM.
The reason is simple. Somewhere in the 50 to 200 megabyte range, all
applications, (or at least their active portion), will reside in memory.
Doubling memory may allow the entire set of applications to reside in
memory, but the performance gain will be small. The larger the memory
capacity, the smaller the gain.
As a result, additional RAM memory will not be added.Kristian Thommesen …@daimi.aau.dk> wrote:: Now being 64MB – it
: would take 4*2.5 years = 10 years before I hit the GB and in 15 years
: I’ll hit the 32bit address-space limit.And how many more years before the count of bits is equivalent to the
number of silicon atoms in earths crust?
Does exponential growth confuse you?: Kristian Thommesen, science student at the University of Aarhus.
How sad.
Not only does Scott shoot down Kristian’s questions, he proceeds to insult him! A full decade later, Scott’s argument is blown out of the water and Kristian has the last laugh after all!
Note: I fixed a few typos in the post 
Update: Kristian’s a guy lol, I read it wrong.
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