RAM and power limits of PC

TrueNAS General
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21

Which says you are a lot younger than me! Never heard of that much memory in my paper tape days.

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22

Aye, but you were lucky!!!

Whoā€™d have thought it sitting here in 2024 sipping Chateau de ChasallĆ©, but I can remember when I was a lad, first computer had to make do with 16KB of Core Memory and a 80bps typewriter, and the boot process took 20minutes. For storage we had to use long strips of paper, and we used to dream of one day being able to afford tā€™hard drive.

But we were lucky! At least we had a 'puter.

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23

I can actually beat you on part of that; my first computer was a VIC-20 with 3.5K of RAM. No paper tape, though; I had the luxury of cassette tape instead. And as it booted from ROM, that process was near-instant.

If youā€™re interested in some nostalgia, you might want to check out Usagi Electric on Youtube. Heā€™s working on a bunch of old gear, including a Bendix G15 from the 1950s (vacuum tubes, paper tape, drum memory, and the most bonkers typewriter Iā€™ve seen with a 28" platen) and a Centurion minicomputer from the '70s. The latter boots; the former, not yet. CDC Hawk and Finch drives, 8" floppies, all kinds of fun stuff. Thereā€™s some flavor of PDP in there as well.

But back to (at least closer to) the topic of this thread, thereā€™s nothing at all wrong with used hardware for TrueNAS; lots of us use it, and lots of us recommend it. But it does need to be suitable to the task, and there are other NAS OSs that arenā€™t as demanding in that regard.

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24

Ah - itā€™s time for a Top Trump cards type comparisonā€¦

  1. My HP 2116C minicomputer probably cost 100x your VIC-20

  2. My HP 2116C minicomputer was 100x the size of your VIC-20

  3. My HP 2116C memory was magnetic core rather than the VIC-20 SRAM.

  4. The 16KB (actually 8K of 16-bit words) included storing 64 words of boot code as well as the operating system whereas the VIC-20 used ROMs for the O/S and (I believe) plugin apps/games ROMs.

(P.S. When I say ā€œmyā€ it was not actually mine as such. I was 11 and it was the school computer lab minicomputer. I also used an IBM 7094 & a CDC 8100 where input was by sending punch cards through the post and receiving line-printer output back also through the post.)

25

Yeah, I never did work with minicomputers (though I remember them, which is why I cringe when I hear people calling a Raspberry Pi a ā€œminicomputerā€); the closest I got was walking through the VAX room at a local university. But I did say I had you beat on ā€œpartā€ of that, not on the whole thing.

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I had the pleasure of loading tapes into big blueā€™s mainframes, shifting disk packs, and working with their DASDs and line printers.

And StorageTek (then Sun, then Oracle) tape silos.

That was work experience though.

27

I recall those when they came out. I was in the military.

And guess what, we still use VAX system in the military. Repair parts are difficult to find, but in the one system that Iā€™m aware of, it should be replaced in a few years. I disposed of several systems. We had a room filled with drives, I think it was 21 disk drives (eleven 14" iron oxide platters). It was a production site generating a lot of disk packs for the submarine fleet.