You were lucky. Why, I can remember when I was a lad…
First mini-computer I used had 16KB of memory, flashing lights, lots of switches and buttons and a teletype with paper tape reader and punch at 10CPS.
First PC I used had a 24x80 character only green and black screen, 40KB of memory and 2x 640KB 5.25" floppy drives.
First laptop had a 128MB hard drive and the only way to fit the O/S was to use compression software. And definitely no room for more than a couple of weeks word documents.
First desktop had a 3GB drive that failed and I lost all my data.
Now my phone has more computing power and memory and storage than all of the above added up and multiplied by 64.
Well, you can plan for replacements every few years (enterprises) or you can wait for components to start to fail and once fixed immediately start to buy an upgrade or you can do what that guy does and keep replacing parts until you can’t get them and it is well and truly dead dead dead and then panic - and worse still make a video exposing all of that publicly. D’oh!
lol, my first computer only had toggle switches and a 8 char alphanumeric LED display. No keyboard, no display, no teletype. Maybe 4k memory? By then, even a Vic20 was light years ahead re computational power.
Alphanumeric displays? You were lucky. We used to DREAM of having alphanumeric displays. All we had was lights and toggle switches for each bit - AND we had to work out what that meant for ourselves.
First computer was a TRS-80 Model III computer with 16K of memory and you had to use cassette tape to store your programs with a transfer speed of either 500 or 1500 baud.
You were lucky to have lights and toggle switches for each bit! We had to flip our bits by hand with used punch cards, a flour mill, and three geriatric donkeys!
Every serious installation has at least one device that operates over a 9600 baud serial connection that these days gets tunneled in some sort of serial over LAN that gets tunneled in a VPN that gets pushed over Wi-Fi off to the remote location.
You are not wrong. Best we have for old school is a leased analog line (like literally a leased hunk of Telco copper) that we change the resistance of at the far end with a level float. We power it at the PLC end with a 24VDC power supply and the returning current is either 4, 8, 12, 16 or 20 mA.
Some day, the Telco is going to take their soccer ball and go home, but until that time, we roll with resistors.
Commodore VIC20 was the first in our house. It had an extension box allowing 24kb of RAM. Followed by a Commodore C128 and an Amiga 500. After that, i switched over to PC’s.
The best part about googling MMU is that the first hit points to medical marijuana regulations on the Florida state web site. Presumably, making our googling history more “interesting” to the autorités was part of @ericloewe’s plan!
I’m not trying to get anyone in trouble, I just think that anyone who tries to overload “MMU” to mean anything other than “Memory Management Unit”, as in the thing that distinguishes serious computers from single-user systems, can go take a hike.
