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trønderen wrote: 'cigar box' PC
I had to look that up, but Google didn't return much with that terminology. 
I suspect you mean one of those small PCs, barely 5x5 inches (if that big). I have a few of those, and love them to the point where I loaded two of them with 64GB of RAM - they're both dedicated to running VMs (I use them rather extensively for work).
But even "only" 16GB should be plenty for his one app.
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dandy72 wrote: The one consistent thing is video cards however. I've never paid more than a few hundred dollars for them, yet somehow there's still a market for $2000 video cards. This is an area where "more money than brains" comes to mind.
About 15 years ago I worked with a young guy who had EVERY electronic toy known to man. He was a rabid gamer, and bought the newest top-of-the-line video card every 6 months. At that time the cards went for $500-$700. Yeah, they run about $2,000 today.
There is value in having a better card. I installed Skyrim about 7 years ago and my video card was insufficient, so I purchased a better one that cost more than double the most expensive GPU I had previous purchased. I was surprised, as the overall speed of my system noticeably improved. I would not buy one of the high-end cards, but buying above average was worth it.
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Right. I tend to buy "second-best" (not what is top of the line at the time of my purchase, but just slightly lower), and very often you'd have a hard time telling the difference unless you went out of your way to compare the specs. And (IMO) if that's what you have to do, you're trying too hard to justify the extra expense.
That being said, the video card in my current gaming rig is about 10 years old. And I feel like I don't have any incentive to replace it until GTA6 comes out...
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I remember when I bought my first 486 back in the day, and specified a Tseng labs ET4000 based video card, because it was then the mutt's nuts for performance.
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dandy72 wrote: The one consistent thing is video cards however. I've never paid more than a few hundred dollars for them, yet somehow there's still a market for $2000 video cards. This is an area where "more money than brains" comes to mind.
I bought an AMD Ryzen 6900xt when I did my pc for 990€ (around 900$), it was the third best casd in that moment. And... it will remain in my pc until it gets broken.
My primary reason to buy it? I could afford it and it was easier to get one from AMD shop than the 6800XT (was my first selection). Extern shops were minimum 175% (up to 350%) of the official price and I didn't want to pay that (although I actually could)
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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I bought a customer a 2gb SCSI drive in 1992 and it was ~ £2000 - and very difficult to find one.
In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity. - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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Oh, just read your post. I posted about buying a 1000MB drive in 91 or so and it being $1 / MB.
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About the same price then
In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity. - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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In the fall of 1986 my parents purchased the brand new Apple ][gs for somewhere in the ballpark of $2500 after a RAM upgrade
It had 1MB of RAM, a 3.5 inch floppy, a 5.25 inch floppy, color screen with a mouse and gui, and ran at up to a blistering 2MHz. It's main selling points were the better than EGA but worse than VGA graphics, and actually nice 16-bit ensoniq sound hardware. You could get apple speakers for it made by bose but we didn't.
Eventually we got a 40MB hard drive for it (2 20MB partitions because that's all GS/OS and ProDOS could handle. I don't know what that set my parents back, but it replaced the power supply in the PC, which should tell you how "intended" a hard drive was for that machine.
Today my desktop cost in the same ballpark.
I have a i5-13600K CPU at 5.1GHz, 32GB of RAM, 6TB of fast 990 Pro NVMe storage, and all the fixins. I bought it about 2 years ago.
I don't know how many orders of magnitude more powerful it is, even breaking down the speed metrics and comparing them because cycle of my current CPU is like many cycles of the old 65C816 in that apple.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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This brought to mind the great advances in power consumption of older and newer devices.
In the mid 1970's I was in college and had a co-op job working for IBM in their Philadelphia data center. It was downtown located midway up one of the high rises. They did education and system support and had the latest IBM 370 mainframe computer. The mainframe consisted of 4 refrigerator sized (think of a double door large modern model) components and ran from standard building 3 phase power.
In a cost cutting move IBM management decided that since the data center only supported education it really did not need the latest and greatest. So they replaced it with a very old IBM 360 model. This model required it's own dedicated motor/generator to supply the filtered power to the mainframe. The motor/generator was huge (roughly 2 meters long by a meter and a half high). It looked like it belonged in the engine room of a large ship. The only problem was to spin the motor/generator up to the proper speed to generate stable power required it would look like a major short circuit to the building power. The operations manager went through the start up draw and matched it against the building's power and figured it would be fine. However, the building engineer felt that the safety trips in the building would stutter and not supply enough power to get the generator up to speed.
The engineer had a work around. They could disable the safety trips for the few seconds that the mass surge of power was needed.
On the day they were going to try this I got a chance to go to the building's power management core (located in that hidden floor in the middle of the building). The fuses in this part of the building were scary, huge. The fuse was as long as your arm (tip of fingers to elbow) and as thick as your leg. There was a special circuit breaker in front of the fuse that was the problem. It was there to protect the fuse (the engineer said they cost thousands of dollars to replace). That circuit breaker was the problem. It would set and then reset as the motor/generator pulled power to get started. Thus starving the motor/generator and preventing it from ever reaching it's intended speed. So even though the draw was within the safety range of the fuse, the circuit breaker would prevent the motor/generator from spinning up. The work-around was to jam a broom against the circuit breaker reset preventing it from tripping. The engineer handed the broom to my ops manager and said the responsibility was all his.
He jammed the broom against the reset and called upstairs to hit the start button. The only thing we noticed was a slight clicking noise from the circuit breaker but the motor started up and got up to speed without popping the fuse. Mission accomplished. Well almost. I later learned that the surge of electricity that got used by the start up caused a number of other buildings down stream to blackout. The manager of the data center facility spent many days in meetings with city, power company and building management of the affected buildings. They placed a cardboard box over the off button with the data center ops manager's number on it and warnings to never turn the motor/generator off.
Oh, by the way, the PC you have plugged into your wall socket has more processing power than that IBM 360.
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I cannot help but notice that we have many Yorkshiremen in the lounge 
And, not to be outdone, my first floating point computing device in high school was a sliding rule. It took about 5 seconds to do a multiplication, hence processor speed = 0.2Hz.
Like every kid of that era, for integer arithmetic I used an abacus in primary school but I don't remember much about it.
Mircea
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I also had a slide rule and was reasonably proficient with it, often getting an extra significant digit by doing that part of the calculation in my head. In 1973, it got replaced by an HP-45 calculator.
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It was de riguer for engineering students to have a slide rule prior to the days of calculators.
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My senior-year Chemistry teacher mentioned that they had Versilogs, large slide rules that they'd hang from their belts. I think one could psychologize about that...
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My first real computer (not counting the TI/99 from 1983?) was a Powermac 6100 from around 1994. Actually, I had two identical cpus, with scsi peripherals (CD, printer) and a single 13'' monitor. IIRC each CPU had 16MB of RAM and each had a 500MB disk. I wound up putting both drives into one of the cpus and later paying almost $300 to add 64MB of RAM. Games ran much better, but the OS was total crap (System 7.5.x) and crashed constantly.
My first Windows PC was an HP Pavilion with a 350MHz AMD chip, a 40MB HDD, 32MB RAM, and a screaming 56Kb modem. I added a SuperDisk drive for around $200. The monitor was a 15'' Sony Trinitron costing another $200. This was my first development computer when I went back to uni in '98. For graduation 2 years later, I got my first laptop, a Gateway Solo 9300 with a huge 15.7'' screen, a 750MHz Pentium III, and 64MB RAM. Unfortunately, it came with the Millenium OS which was total crap. After a few too many crashes during development (lost work) I bought a copy of Win2K for it. I used Win2K as my OS of choice for almost 10 years, basically skipping XP altogether. Happy Days!
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
"Hope is contagious"
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The first computer I ever owned was the TI/99-4A!
My first PC was a 386SX with 2 MB of RAM!
The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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Yeah, mine was the 4a as well, bought as a Christmas gift for my two brothers and I. All they wanted to do was play games on it. (Tombstone, Micro-surgeon, Alpiner, Congo Bongo, and Pirate Adventure are the ones I remember) I was more interested in figuring out how to make it do something useful...like my geometry homework. Learning BASIC helped a lot when I started my CS degree a couple of years later. I graduated 14 years later! 
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
"Hope is contagious"
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BryanFazekas wrote: [I do mean Hz, not MHz or GHz]
You must be mistaken. I guarantee you that the CPU clock speed was not 7.5 cycles per second (Hertz). It must have been MHz.
The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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You are correct. I updated the original post.
You may be correct. This was 40 years ago ... memory is a bit fuzzy.
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Back in the 90's I remember wasting $300 on a Zip drive. The lure of storing 100 MB on each cartridge was too much. It seems like the cartridges were relatively expensive as well.
Of course about a year later they came out with CD Writers built into the PC's already.
Brent Hoskisson
Brent
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I am a few weeks older than the IBM System/360 announcement.
When I was eight or nine, my father gave an introductory programming course in the Weizman Institute (their mainframe was a 360) and took me along. My first program was in Fortran on punched cards. It read pairs of numbers and output their product. True to form, it had a bug in it. 
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Wordle 1,168 4/6
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Wordle 1,168 3/6*
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"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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