Pure Digital Thought

Speaking of the RAM I’ve got coming; anyone remember the good ole days when machines didn’t have shit for RAM and you had to take a house loan to buy a meager amount of RAM? I guess it wasn’t really the good ole days but you know what I mean.

Before putting together this server, I had looked at a bunch of VPS services. Many have a really high “burst” of RAM or CPU but the amount you are allocated is only about 128-256M at least the servers in my price range. I thought, “Holy crap, how can you run a server on that little RAM”. See, where I work we have “real” servers like 4-ways with at least 4096M of RAM.

But, I dug far back in my memory to recall the fact that systems used to be just fine with so little RAM. In fact, Warren messaged me on Gtalk the other day (get it or be square) and he said it was the 10-year anniversary of Windows 95. It was hard to believe it had been 10 years since the Stones rocked the world into buying Win95. His other little tidbit that was interesting was that at the time it cost $300 for 8MB of RAM! I kinda remember actually buying 8M of RAM for something like $250 on my old 486DX4. Maybe I erased all of that from my brain during college or something.

Anyways, I went into the computer room and pulled out an old Dell I had in the corner, booted it up, and slooowly started installing Gentoo Linux. Gentoo bootstraps the OS and compiles everything from the ground up. So on a 333Mhz with 64M of RAM, it takes a while. However, I’m pretty impressed. Even for so little resources, this box seems to do okay. The only actual slowdown I’m getting is when it has to swap stuff to the disk to free up some memory and that should be fixed soon with some RAM lovin’.

I got a steal on the RAM: 128M for $50. Yeah, that is actually expensive if you compare that to buying a gig for my game computer but this is old school PC66 RAM. I suppose you have to pay for the nostalgia or something.