Nasa pc ram12/30/2023 While Windows 3.0, arguably the first mass-market release of the product was being sold aggressively and was starting to gain initial popularity - Microsoft sold 2.75 Million copies of the software in 1990 - it sold 8 million DOS 5.0 licenses the following year. Windows wasn't the predominant application environment. The reason why I referred to 1991 earlier as a year of transition is that while we had Windows, most people who were using PC's considered it brand spanking new, as 3.0 was the first version that was considered to be actually usable. Suffice to say we got by in 1991 with a whole lot less than we do now and it cost a whole lot more. Heck, If you somehow were able to pass through a wormhole and show me, the 21-year old Jason an iPad, I would have stared at it mouth agape thinking it was a stage prop from Star Trek: The Next Generation (which, for those of you keeping track, was in its fourth season at the time.)Īnd that was state of the art at the time. My 600Mhz first-generation Motorola Droid, with 16GB of internal storage, considered to be about 2 years behind the times in terms of current smartphone horsepower, would be the stuff of science fiction in 1991. To put this in perspective, the typical Android, Blackberry or iPhone smartphone that somebody carries today is at least 40 or 50 times more powerful than the most decked-out PC that was sold in 1991. Enterprise minicomputers and UNIX boxes had hundreds of megs, maybe gigs of data, on SCSI-2 hard drives. It was unfathomable, from the perspective of a 1991 PC user. Gigabytes? That's the sort of storage you'd think about an entire company having online. Impressive sound and graphics was a niche that belonged to the Macintoshes, the Amigas, and the Atari ST's of the world. Very few PCs had CD-ROM drives and multimedia software was nearly non-existent on the PC platform. Windows 3.0 came on six or seven floppies, as I recall, not counting the DOS install disks. A network operating system like NetWare 3.11 might come on nearly thirty floppy disks. Or 200MB, But then you were in SCSI territory, big bucks.ĬD-ROM technology was just in its infancy, and we were using 1.2MB and 1.44MB floppy disks to distribute software. If you were a serious power user, you might have a 100MB hard drive. Typical IDE hard drives of the day had 20Meg, 40Meg or 80Meg capacities. And if you really wanted to make it fly like a rocketship and run a ton of apps on it, you'd need like 4 Megs of RAM, if you wanted to run say, Word, Excel and PowerPoint at the same time.Ĥ Megs, by the way, is about as much space as one MP3 song or a single RAW 3.1 Megapixel photograph takes up. The 486DX 50Mhz was over 700 times less dense, transistor-wise, and over 3000 times less powerful than what you can put on your desktop today.Īnd the amount of memory and hard drive space on these things? Well, if you wanted to run Windows 3.0 halfway decently, you needed at least a Meg of RAM. Today, none of that mishegas really goes on because PCs are heavily commoditized as consumer products and there's very little room for pricing games even with business-class systems.Ĭompare these systems with today's fastest Intel Core i7 desktop chip, clocking at 3.4Ghz, with 731 million transistors on it, running at 159,000 MIPS. You'll notice if you read the various other ads in the rear of those Infoworld issues there was a ton of pricing games going on with the "White Box" 2nd-tier and 3rd-tier vendors to try to squeeze out the margins.
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