SGI: hinv

I remember a major state university (est. 50,000 students and 10,000 staff) ran their total computing program with about 12M of RAM spread across two mainframes. This supported the school itself, large comp sci and EE departments (along with other science departments but I didn't know people in those programs) and ran ALL the reporting for a local bank network at night. They didn't need two mainframes for this but at the time they used to crash a lot and they were sponsored to the university (free) so why not. So yeah. It shows you can get an unbelievable amount of work done if you start off with good hardware and software.

If spying on innocent people didn't require so much storage and processing we'd probably all be working on 30MHz workstations with 16M of RAM and liking it. Instead we find 3x2 GHz CPUs and 2G of RAM is an absolute minimum for a functional desktop even under Linux.

Don't think they ever shipped 8MB Indys, but 16MB was equally unusable, mostly because IRIX 5.1 was awful. Tom Davis of SGI wrote wrote an interesting memo about it. The 16MB Indy was referred to as the Indigo without the 'go' .

I've used both and the 16MB Indy 'wins'. I used to do software development back in the day on a 32MB Indy running IRIX 5.1.1.x We had to reboot it regularly because it would run out of memory just sitting there. Then I managed to borrow an IRIX 5.3 disc from a friendly sysadmin at the local Uni and talked someone into buying an extra 64MB RAM for the thing. Now *that* made a difference

Oh, and the Indigo R3000 is a cool little box. It's like they took the Personal Iris and transformed it from a roaring brown monster into this cute little desktop. And it really works well with IRIX 4.x. You just have to find the contemporary software or build stuff from source.

Naw - back when computer development was heavily federally subsidized the driving forces were cracking Russian codes and modeling the big bangs (the terrestrial human-initiated ones). Now the driving force is gamers, people buying faster computers because their machine is too "slow" (perhaps something to do with the 15 toolbars and 6 "security" programs installed), ridiculously overdesigned webpages, and shoddy coding with unneded glitz.

amen to that and a double scotch for you

So the company gifted me with an old laptop to use and unfortunately it came equipped with a pirated (unregistered) and useless (especially w/ 1gb ram) installation of Windows 7. After trying to find something suitable to run on it I have to ask the question: Why does OSX run so much better and faster on a 7-year-old dell d820 than ubuntu and just as zipp-ily as the ancient windows XP? The only caveat is the docking station is not supported

Do you remember the part from Dante's Inferno where the people were doomed to run forever after a red flag being blown by the wind? That, unfortunately, seems to be a good illustration for much of modern-day F/OSS software development. Unless there's a very strong head figure (Torvalds/Stallman/...) they run back and forth and try to support so much that the end result is kind of messy many times. Still love it and use it often, but I do notice the downsides.

While I'm stuck on older versions of OS X (not willing to give up Rosetta yet), it seems that Apple hasn't quite bought into the dynamic visual effects quite as much as some other systems (big offender - Compiz on Linux. Ugh). Useless visual geegaws eat up a lot of computing power. Also, Mac has many fewer add-ins/system tray junk it seems.