A classic Monty Python sketch, in which four "old-timers" play oneupsmanship over how bad they had it in the past. Also imitated on other sketch comedy shows, such as Saturday Night Live.
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- http://ayup.co.uk/laugh/laugh0.html
It's often, consciously or unconsciously, replayed by IT workers, mostly because of the rapid improvement in hardware and software in the span of one career:
A: Well, looks like memory consumption is under control. The server ran all night, and never got above 250MB.
B: Heh.
A: What?
B: 250MB. I remember when we implemented an entire database-driven system that did the same thing, and our memory budget was only 32MB.
A: Yeah. Of course, back when I started, most end-user machines only had 8MB of RAM...32 would have been a luxury!
C:
(jumping in) Eight megs? Eight megs? I used to run a whole corporate server on a machine that big.
D: Well, I cut my teeth on a Commodore machine... megs? Try 64k, a 1MHz processor, and three registers: one could add but not address memory, and two could address memory but not add.
A: Ahh, you were lucky. You had a Commodore 64, then? I started out with a Commodore PET. 4k of RAM, and we used it to control an entire factory floor.
E: Heh... microcomputers. Now, the PDP-8....
that was a machine. Put any of these Java kiddies in front of that and he'd be crying into his latte.
F: 4k bytes of RAM ? Wimps. Why, back in my day we didn't even have zeroes and ones. We had to use the the letter O and lower-case l's.
...ad infinitum...
I remember a round of this many years ago in alt.folklore.computers. After someone talked about keying programs in using front panel switches, the inevitable response was (sorry, paraphrasing from memory):
"Switches? Oh, we used to dream of having switches! In my day we had to program the machine by licking our fingers and shorting out individual circuits."
- "...and it wasn't any wimpy 3.3V (or lower) CMOS, either--this was using vacuum tubes, and there were 300V on those circuits! We lost many a good programmer that way..."
I can remember when 250Mb on a
server was considered large.... nowadays, the W
alMart-special PC has more RAM than that. (And it still isn't enough to run
WindowsXp)
I bought a PC once, and upgraded to a 40 MB disk. $1200 (US) for the machine at the time. Now 32Mb costs$20 and fits on my keychain
- I've seen gigabyte memory sticks, etc. for under $100; and that's the SolidState variety. You can get spinning-disk type keychain drives with several orders of magnitude greater capacity for a similar price. In a couple years, this observation will seem positively primitive.
CategoryJoke