You'll never have gigabytes of RAM

Filed under: Hardware, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Retrocomputing

Long ago, in a newsgroup far away a few computer geeks predicted that one day, computers would address gigabytes of RAM. It caused quite a stir.

One particular pedant shot back, "No personal computer will ever have gigabytes of RAM, just as no automobile has giga-gallon gas tanks." Never say never, right? His reasoning was 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." Oh how wrong he was. My current desktop is stuffed with 2GB. The laptop I'm writing on is bursting with 768MB, and could use an upgrade.

How many barriers that we perceive as solid will be smash through in the next ten years; A world full of multi-terabyte solid state drives, cheap and plentiful LCDs in mind melting dimensions, ubiquitous access to all your data from everywhere?

What do Download Squad readers see deep within the crystal ball which might blow a modern mind?

You'll never have gigabytes of RAM originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 19 Feb 2007 11:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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