It wasn't even wrong. There wasn't a need for that much memory on a desktop then. You could already do wonders with 64KB on an 8bit micro: edit text, run spreadsheets, play games. You would need more for multimedia or web surfing, but that was still in the future.

Exactly! It's like saying today that 64gb of ram should be enough for just about everyone in their personal machine.

In 10 years, that might be a hilariously small number, but for right now, it's way more than the extreme vast majority will need.

There is a limit though. By the time you get to the point where you can store more high-definition movies than you can possibly watch in a lifetime you have definitely passed the point of diminishing returns. And with non-volatile storage, we're pretty much already there.

Until a new format comes out which requires magnitudes more storage?

I can already imagine vr-style videos pushing 8k with huge dynamic range and very high framerates becoming more common if the technology continues to go that direction, and suddenly a full video export in the highest quality becomes a magnitude (or 2!) jump larger.

As videogames become higher resolutions, they require higher res textures, and less compressed audio, and more detailed models. Not just like 50% more detailed, but 10x more detailed.

Sure, we are beyond the point now where it's pretty easy for the average person to store all information they ever could need on spinning disks for pretty cheap, but once that next "thing" comes out that requires a magnitude more, we are right back to looking silly for thinking 5tb should be enough for anyone!

> Until a new format comes out which requires magnitudes more storage?

No, even that has a limit. We're getting to the point where humans will be unable to perceive additional improvements in resolution. It's no different from audio. CDs are unchanged from when they were introduced 36 years ago because humans cannot hear the difference between a CD and "higher-qualitY" audio. There is a point where that will happen for video: when you can fill the entire field of view of the human eye with video the same resolution as your fovea at ~100FPS, that's it. There is no more room for improvement.

> No, even that has a limit. We're getting to the point where humans will be unable to perceive additional improvements in resolution.

Not all improvements come with only resolution as the change. It's entirely possible (if somewhat less feasible, based on what I think) that we might start encoding movies as full 3D landscapes, with some preset positions for each scene (e.g. where the director wants the"camera"), but that people could roam around to view it from different aspects at their discretion. This is less or more interesting in certain performances, but imagine some great war film, and you can flit around to see the different people storming the beach or crossing no-man's land. What if you decide to make your own run and see if you would have made it or not?

3D headsets are just now breaking into the mainstream. That's a major shift in medium if taken advantage of, and it could easily create use cases where the media is many multiples of it's current size.

> There is a point where that will happen for video: when you can fill the entire field of view of the human eye with video the same resolution as your fovea at ~100FPS, that's it. There is no more room for improvement.

There's a lot of room for improvement in VR though. VR is computationally expensive because you have to calculate 2 sets of high resolution imagery. Not to mention that immersiveness in VR comes at a resolution cost. We're nowhere near 100FPS, high resolution 4k VR imagery.

I mostly agree with you. I wrote a paper during my time at Bose arguing against the rise of 4k which in retrospect I think has only been halfway true so far -- we've known for many years that consumers would not experience a significant improvement upgrading their televisions, but the 4k market is burgeoning anyways. We also didn't anticipate back then how important 4k would be to gaming and VR.

Not to mention that the lack of penetration of higher quality music in the market is mostly a cost problem rather than a storage problem. The average consumer cannot afford the sound setup necessary to truly utilize these higher quality codecs, whereas a 4k television panel can be had for under 500 now a days (!!!!). Netflix offers 4k streaming at 10/month, whereas Tidal's lossless streaming costs 20/month. It is shockingly inexpensive to be into high quality images.

4K works for 40 degree field of view (That's pushing it, but for immersive movies that's what THX recommends). 4K works because of the increased HDR and framerate.

But most of it is 4K works because of the hype. Why buy last year's model?

4K is a resolution for 40 degrees wide and 23 degrees high. That's about 1/45th of a sphere, or about 2% of the total you'd need for a fully immersive 360 degree picture.

From what I've seen, 120fps is a clear improvement over 60fps, and that's just on a normal flat screen.

So even with a fixed focus single image you're looking at needing 400 megapixels. At 30 bits per pixel that's 12GBit per frame, or 1.5TBit/second.

You've then got technology that records depth, and allows people to chose their own depth of field. And why stop at visible resolution - we don't with pictures, because we can zoom in. Imagine a choice of say 100 360 degree cameras around a football stadium that allows you to zoom to a desired level, you could be up Petabit emerging from the stadium.

> whereas a 4k television panel can be had for under 500 now a days

i would be much more worried about color accuracy than resolution with a $500 tv. could be i'm wrong due to economies of scale from large amount of consumers demanding "the 4K", but my guess is that a $500 1080p tv could look significantly better than 4K at the same price.

Just jump to the real limit: at some point, you can't fit more information into a space without creating a black hole.

How about storing entire realistic maps of worlds that you can walk around in?

Indeed, imagine how much space you'd need to have something like google streetview, at a resolution that not only is 4K for any given viewport, but allows zooming in and maintaining that 4K resolution for a significant magnification.

Then multiply it by 3 orders of magnitude to bring in temporal detail.

And you're still after a format that records the depth of each pixel, allowing recreation of a true 3d environment.

The numbers would be astronomical. Lets say a single 360 degree picture, using 30 bits per pixel (R,G,B,Depth at 10 bits each), allowing 100x zoom, so 40gpixels, 50 bits per pixel, that's 200GBytes per image.

One image every metre, or 1600 every mile, 4 million miles of roads in the U.S. alone. That's a billion terrabytes.

1Exabyte is 10% of what Randall Munroe estimated google had in 2013. Not that much. Wow.

Storage doesn't really have diminishing returns unfortunately when it comes to fidelity.

Fidelity has diminishing returns though.

Re: It wasn't even wrong. There wasn't a need for that much memory on a desktop then.

What more RAM does is allow programmers to "be lazy": slap libraries together and use powerful but resource-hungry abstractions rather than hand-tune details.

We have a similar pattern today with JavaScript and CSS layering in web pages, making them slow and bloated.

It's increasing hardware usage in order to reduce greyware (human programmer) usage. Whether such is "smart" or economical makes for an interesting debate. It appears consumers prefer cheaper software over cheaper hardware for some reason. Software developers who are fastidious over hardware resource usage (RAM & CPU) are not sufficiently rewarded. The group that slaps existing API's together to get their product out quick and cheap seem to come out ahead.

I remember how MS-Office for DOS shipped on 7 floppy disks. I kept wondering why people tolerate loading 7 floppies. It's because the alternatives of the time were harder to use or cost more.

> I remember how MS-Office for DOS shipped on 7 floppy disks.

You must be remembering something else because there were no DOS versions of Office.

It could have been Excel plus Word and maybe some other utilities that I don't remember. It was "Office-like".

There was no version of Excel for DOS either. It started on the Mac, then went straight to Windows. IIRC the first couple of versions even came bundled with the Windows runtime.

Well, maybe Word for DOS took up 7-ish floppies.

At one of the Microsoft company meetings in the middle to late 2000s (I recall it was at Safeco Field) he claimed that when IBM was developing the PC he tried to convince them to use an MC68000 instead of the 8088. He said going with the 8088 set the industry back ten years. Assuming he wasn't making the story up, it's hard to imagine him making that quote or even agreeing with it.

> He said going with the 8088 set the industry back ten years.

That's what it always felt like as an Amiga user. Not before DOOM there was much I liked on the PC.

Release Amiga 1000: July '85 Release DOOM: December '94

I saw an Amiga once in person around 86 and spent that next decade disappointed, but advocating that the future of computing was going to be great. Emotionally I still feel like we haven't caught up to the Amiga but I imagine that isn't really true, heh.

Similar story with me. I got an Amiga 1000 and did a fair bit of assembly coding on it, then ended up writing some 16-bit x86 assembly for school later on. Being used to having sixteen 32-bit registers, then all the sudden having to use AX, BX, CX, and DX (and don't forget they all have slightly different purposes!) was like being brutally shoved back into the 80's.

Well, history has shown neither RISC nor CISC as actually a better choice, since both models more or less converged to a sort of hybrid design years ago.

And what this has to do with Amiga?

At a simplistic level, the difference between RISC and CISC processor design boils down to having many registers and reduced instructions, or few registers and extra specialized instructions.

What was being described is going to programming from a RISC-like design processor to a CISC-like design processor, and how they felt constrained after doing so. It likely does feel more constraining (I don't really remember how I felt about it back when I did it, but I also went the other direction, and only in the context of classwork), but in the end, most people are programming a level removed from that anyways.

There used to be quite a lot of arguments about what design was better (IMO mostly fueled by Macs running a RISC processor and Windows running a CISC processor, at least until Apple switched to x86). I find it slightly comical that both designs ended up in a fairly similar place though (with RISC processors adding extra instructions, and CISC processors adding more registers, even if mostly just logical registers).

All of them: IBM PC, Amiga and classic Mac were using CISC CPUs...

You're right that the Amiga was CISC, I was mistaken there.

The Classic Mac was as well, but PowerPC based macs were RISC, which is what I was recalling in my followup.

And seriously, who thought that "MOV A B" actually means "A = B" was a good idea?

68000 has it right!

I must have been 12 or 13 years old when I first met an IBM PC. I was used to 8 bit micros having BASIC right away (and colour). But you couldn't do anything with a PC before using two floppies. First DOS then whatever. It just seemed awful. Why would anyone want one of those?

I was used to all the 8 bit machines and their graphics and sound too, but I was enthralled by 80 column BASIC and DOS with its hierarchal file system as well. I saw it as a separate branch of computing entirely.

And once EGA came out, it quickly started to surpass the 8 bits as a gaming platform too.

That's not correct. If you don't have a floppy disk, the PC boots into ROM BASIC just like the 8-bit home computers of the time.

Here's the thing though. Engineering workstations existed. There's a good argument that the "right" approach was to use an MC68K and, while you were at it, a "real" operating system whether a Unix or one of the 16-bit operating systems in use on minicomputers at the time. But there's also a good argument that, had you done a more open and mass market-oriented engineering workstation (whatever that meant exactly) at, what?, 2x the price point of an IBM PC--which, remember, didn't even always have a hard disk at the time--you'd not have been competitive with Z80 or 6502 machines.

Even using the 8088 vs. the 8086 was a cost-saving move. A premium IBM PC might well have simply flopped rather than accelerating the industry.

It's not clear to me that at the time the m68k was that much more expensive than x86. It certainly was not by 84/85 when the Atari ST was shipping as a sub-$1000 cheap home computer based around it.

I think the bigger compelling piece for x86 was its continuity with the top-selling 8080/Z80 CP/M machines that were the effective standard at the time. IBM offered both PC-DOS (cheap) and CP/M (expensive), and wasn't sure which was going to win out. And PC-DOS was basically a kind of clone of CP/M, down to the API call names.

There was also the fact that the IBM people working on the original PC had already established familiarity with Intel's architecture through their work on an earlier IBM product, the Datamaster (http://www.oldcomputers.net/ibm5322.html), which used the 8-bit Intel 8085.

David J. Bradley (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bradley_(engineer)) worked on both the Datamaster and the PC projects, and explained the reasoning behind the choice of the 8088 for the latter in an article in the September 1990 issue of Byte (https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1990-09/1990_09_BYT...):

There were a number of reasons why we chose the Intel 8088 as the IBM PC's central processor.

1. The 64K-byte address limit had to be overcome. This requirement meant that we had to use a 16-bit microprocessor.

2. The processor and its peripherals had to be available immediately. There was no time for new LSI chip development, and manufacturing lead times meant that quantities had to be available right away.

3. We couldn't afford a long learning period; we had to use technology we were familiar with. And we needed a rich set of support chips -- we wanted a system with a DMA controller, an interrupt controller, timers, and parallel ports.

4. There had to be both an operating system and applications software available for the processor.

Points 1 and 3 both reference lessons learned from the Datamaster project -- #1 is about the desire for the PC to overcome a limitation the Datamaster's 8-bit CPU had imposed on it, and #3 refers to the fact that the 8086 and 8088 were close cousins of the 8085, so the IBMers wouldn't have to learn a whole new architecture from scratch.

It's not hard to imagine the decision coming down to Bradley (or someone else on the Entry Systems Division team) calling someone they knew at Intel and saying "we need a 16-bit processor as similar to the 8085 as possible that you can deliver in volume tomorrow. Whatcha got?"

Point #4 would definitely have been a concern for the m68k as well. DR's CPM/68k wasn't AFAIK available yet (came a few years later), and Unix would have been expensive and too heavy weight.

They only offered CP/M after Kildal threatened a lawsuit, and at 3x the price. I think it was fairly certain which would win by IBM. That and DOS was mostly compatible, famously porting Visicalc only required changing 3 bytes.

This could be apocryphal (there was free beer at the company meeting), but I think I recall he (Gates) mentioned at the time that the existence of a solid chipset to support the 8088 was something that drove the ultimate decision.

It was not (or not just) for cost-saving reasons. It was due to a cross-licensing agreement between Intel and IBM for technology called Bubble Memory which turned out to be flop, but IBM didn't know at the time that it would flop.

"Next came the 8088, the processor for the first IBM PC. Even though IBM engineers at the time wanted to use the Motorola 68000 in the PC, the company already had the rights to produce the 8086 line (by trading rights to Intel for its bubble memory)"

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/pa-microhist/inde...

Note that IBM introduced a 68000 machine just over a month before the PC came out, which caused some confusion at that time.

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=623

But 1981 was just too early for 68000 non workstation machines since the early chips were slow and expensive. The 1983 Lisa was limited to 4MHz, for example, in contrast to the 1984 Macintosh's 8MHz. I remember the price of the chips dropping from over $100 to less than $20 in just one year back then.

This I can believe. It's reasonably well known that the first PC design was deliberately crippled in order not to impact on sales of the dedicated word processor, the IBM Displaywriter.

The 8086 was thought too powerful and would compete against existing IBM products, so the 8088 was chosen. Other changes to expansion and bus architecture were on the same basis.

I spent over a decade completely failing to understand how it could succeed against Amiga.

>If someone at IBM decided that there should be 640Kb of available RAM for programs it's believable that Bill might have simply been agreeing with them.

Yeah, "640k should be enough for anybody (specifically in the context of a conversation about current hardware of software and not necessarily in perpetuity)"

To follow up on that: as if stating anything that’s perfectly acceptable today but not years from now is somehow outrageous.

“8 core CPUs or 32GB of RAM are more than enough for gaming” (c) 2018

Facts change and opinions change with them. Wonder if Moore’s law will get the same treatment now.

Maybe that's why Google Chrome was created, to prevent anyone ever again suggesting that any particular amount of RAM should be enough.

No, the point of the 'quote' is people trying to make a point that 'even Bill Gates' can't predict the future need for technology requirements expanding.

Of course that's wrong, and most of the time it is used by people who don't understand the trade offs made in incremental advancements in tech standards.

I'm not even sure he was as wrong as people claim. They used to do a lot with very limited memory. Now, modern computers "need" hundreds of megabytes for a chat application, and slow down for the latest Gmail revamp. The quote serves as a reminder of how well we used to economize on memory.

I don't think the point is that Bill Gates should be ashamed. It's a reminder how fast technology changes and that the assumptions we make today could be invalidated just as quickly.

He didnt understand he was wrong. He never learnt a lesson. Years later when Microsoft was launching their Zume audio player, he played a fool on the scene with bunch of people acting that he never heard if iPod.