Comment by forinti
7 years ago
It wasn't even wrong. There wasn't a need for that much memory on a desktop then. You could already do wonders with 64KB on an 8bit micro: edit text, run spreadsheets, play games. You would need more for multimedia or web surfing, but that was still in the future.
Exactly! It's like saying today that 64gb of ram should be enough for just about everyone in their personal machine.
In 10 years, that might be a hilariously small number, but for right now, it's way more than the extreme vast majority will need.
There is a limit though. By the time you get to the point where you can store more high-definition movies than you can possibly watch in a lifetime you have definitely passed the point of diminishing returns. And with non-volatile storage, we're pretty much already there.
Until a new format comes out which requires magnitudes more storage?
I can already imagine vr-style videos pushing 8k with huge dynamic range and very high framerates becoming more common if the technology continues to go that direction, and suddenly a full video export in the highest quality becomes a magnitude (or 2!) jump larger.
As videogames become higher resolutions, they require higher res textures, and less compressed audio, and more detailed models. Not just like 50% more detailed, but 10x more detailed.
Sure, we are beyond the point now where it's pretty easy for the average person to store all information they ever could need on spinning disks for pretty cheap, but once that next "thing" comes out that requires a magnitude more, we are right back to looking silly for thinking 5tb should be enough for anyone!
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Storage doesn't really have diminishing returns unfortunately when it comes to fidelity.
Fidelity has diminishing returns though.
Re: It wasn't even wrong. There wasn't a need for that much memory on a desktop then.
What more RAM does is allow programmers to "be lazy": slap libraries together and use powerful but resource-hungry abstractions rather than hand-tune details.
We have a similar pattern today with JavaScript and CSS layering in web pages, making them slow and bloated.
It's increasing hardware usage in order to reduce greyware (human programmer) usage. Whether such is "smart" or economical makes for an interesting debate. It appears consumers prefer cheaper software over cheaper hardware for some reason. Software developers who are fastidious over hardware resource usage (RAM & CPU) are not sufficiently rewarded. The group that slaps existing API's together to get their product out quick and cheap seem to come out ahead.
I remember how MS-Office for DOS shipped on 7 floppy disks. I kept wondering why people tolerate loading 7 floppies. It's because the alternatives of the time were harder to use or cost more.
> I remember how MS-Office for DOS shipped on 7 floppy disks.
You must be remembering something else because there were no DOS versions of Office.
It could have been Excel plus Word and maybe some other utilities that I don't remember. It was "Office-like".
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