Yet another reason to get angry with Bill...

[Alan McKinnon]

On Sunday 19 March 2006 02:17, Eric Dunbar wrote:
> > 500M is actually a lot, lately we are used to environments that
> > take up 3G just to be compiled. 500M is slightly smaller than a
> > typical drive from '98 and look at what we put on them then.
>
> Half a GB is stunning. I still remember when my Mac was a *monster*
> because I had a 270 MB drive in there!!!
>
> I still remember <creak crack back breaking> when my Mac had its
> entire GUI operating system packed onto a tiny fraction for a 400
> KB floppy with enough room left over for one or two apps and the
> computer had a stunning 128 KB of RAM!!! (and, for all practical
> purposes it provided as much utility as a modern 3+ GHz machine
> that's used for everyday work tasks (sans internet)).

Har. I remember my first pc - 512K RAM and 10M disk. Before that was a 
Spectrum with 16k and a 48k wobbly adapter at the back that always 
fell off on the last statement of a three page program. Before that 
was the Mk14 with 512 *bytes* - every joint on the board lovingly 
hand soldered by your's truly.

And before that it was hand threading toroid cores onto thin wires and 
300baud acoustic modems that were so unreliable we had to whistle the 
notes into the mouthpiece to get a connection most times. At to get 
to school to learn all this we had to walk seven miles without shoes 
in the freezing winter and eat once a week. Oh wait, that's not true. 
That part's the fairy tale I tell my son to impress him. :-)

But seriously, this OLPC project has tons of scope, an opportunity to 
make the Linux nay-sayers shut up and take notice.

-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za
+27 82, double three seven, one nine three five