I have spent years operating computers. Going back to the mid seventies I was involved with then the simplest form of computers in which data entry was the skill of the day!
It was nothing but a card filled with tiny rectangles that represented machine language numbers. The industry then morphed into what amounted to nothing more than a keyboard without a monitor. Everything was entered manually through the keyboard and printed out through a dot-matrix printer.
Literally thousands of printed pages formally known as ‘computer only paper’ ran through the printer and that was our earliest form of a monitor. Usually the best computer keyboards i.e., ‘terminals’ were locate at college universities where one room housed dozens of terminals and there was a separate room for a monstrous computer that was linked to all terminals.
Yes only 30 short years ago what was housed in a megalithic system filling an entire room from top to bottom had the get up and go power of less then one small file amidst tens of thousands of files of one of our software programs that operate now.
Yes this industry has leaped technologically beyond all imagination. Even 15 years ago, a computer having 250K of memory was considered massive. Remember the Commodore 64. This represented 64 kilobytes of memory or 64,000 bytes.
Today this would be considered a joke.
From that time not so long ago, the memory began to increase. 64 turned into 128, then 256, then 512 and then we entered the day of 1MB of memory. This seemed unbelievable, who could have ever dreamed that a computer could house this much memory potential?
It did not end there, in fact not even close. We then entered the 2MB then 4MB then 8MB and this led to our first real good connection to the internet. However due to the popularity of this new advancement called the World Wide Web, 8MB simply became ineffective
We then added higher processor speeds in our new toys and then finally 16MB of Random access memory became the techno dream.
Do you realize this was only 11 short years ago when 16 megabytes of memory was the most powerful ram speed in computers, at least non-military computers.
You would have thought that we busted through the apex of this science and we simply could not go any further. From 1975 to 1995 we went from a gigantic computer that only scratched the surface of random access memory, to a small machine that could handle a hard drive and additional memory to run programs that had excess of 16 million bytes of memory.
But from 1995 – 2006 we leaped into a whole new era of this science. From 16MB in 1995 we have now developed technology that allows even smaller computers to carry more than 2 billion bytes of Random Access Memory. That is 2GiGaBytes!
Today we are mesmerized by faster processing units and specialty software, yet few still understand the real importance of extra memory called Random Access Memory. At a future date I want to explain why this extra memory or lack thereof is the key to a smooth running machine.
You give me more RAM along with a solid hard drive and my computer will continue to operate effectively with advanced technology long after it will be deemed a dinosaur. RAM is the energy life blood of computer operations. Without it you just have another slow moving super computer!
