Quote:
Originally Posted by Penforhire
And real-life people should avoid saying things like, "640 KB is more memory than anyone will ever need," ha ha.
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You have to remember that the CPU used in the target machines back then couldn't see more than 1MB of memory. The decision to restrict conventional memory to 640KB was IBM's, who chose to put drivers and other system functions above that line. And Lotus 1,2,3 promptly forced everyone to upgrade to a full 640KB to accommodate the enormous worksheets they were creating. (And Lotus bought an early competitor to get access to the "sparse matrix" technology they had developed to economize on RAM usage.)
The defining factor is probably economics, not technology, and the question is "How much memory can you afford?" We're seeing serious attempts now to replace disk drives with moving parts with solid state drives based on flash memory. It's still too expensive to entirely replace disks with flash, but hybrids are increasingly common.
The one assumption you can make when using computers in your story is that whatever technology you use to "future proof" it, you'll probably be wrong. Better, all told, to just show your characters using the devices, and don't pop the hood and start talking about
how they work, unless the how is critical to the story.
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Dennis