At the time I remember being amazed that the company I worked for paid out $$$ to get some SGI machines up to ~160Mb of RAM. This was because the software we used had a memory leak of some sorts and needed such an extravagantly 'wasteful' amount of memory.

Having the sockets to support up to 160Mb was one thing, having long enough arms and deep enough pockets to pay for it was something else. Hence 'unimaginable'.

Nowadays you get a couple of sockets on your laptop, back then whether laptop or something else, a workstation would have lots and lots of sockets for memory, usually with very few of them filled.

I was a student at the time, and all the computer science researchers I knew were maxing out their laptops with 128 MB.

In the June 1998 MacWorld, you could order a 128 MB upgrade for your brand new PowerBook G3 for $389 [1]. Not cheap, but not that extravagant.

[1] https://archive.org/details/MacWorld_9806_June_1998/page/n13...

Ah but that was for a Mac. In the days before the internet as we know it you didn't have commodity RAM for workstations. You had to pay extra or risk voiding your warranty. Plus someone else was paying so why run the risk?

Sure the chips were commodity but the modules would have a different pinout. They would be advertised as better.t

Another problem was that the more memory you bought the more it cost per megabyte. A set of chips to fill the sockets with 128Mb would cost three times as much as a set of chips that filled the sockets to give 64Mb.

In 1997, a powerful desktop PC had 64 MB. 128 MB was definitely workstation-class, and extremely rare on a laptop. For reference, the SGI O2 workstation came out in late 1996, and standard configurations were 64, 128 and 256MB of RAM, and maxed out at 1 GB (which cost several thousand dollars). The previous SGI Indy (1992 to 1996), still a real beast in 1997 if you had the 180Mhz R5000 version, maxed out at 256 MB.

Remember that back then, hardware evolved really fast; I had a 128 MB laptop in 2000. So it went from "unheard of" to "standard" in 5 years or so.

My current work machines have had 8 GB for 7 years :)

Back in the late 90s most consumers and even some power users were using 486 laptops (myself included) because Pentium laptops were still pricey. Affordable laptops back then were usually a generation behind desktops in speed and hardware support; there wasn't a mobile culture like there is today. When you did get a PowerBook or HP like you mentioned, you paid through the nose for it.

I was using a TI TravelMate 4000M (made by Acer) from 1995 to 1998, it was a graduation gift from my estranged father. It propelled me into modern (for the time) computing and set me on the course to the career I have today. I never upgraded beyond 8MB of RAM (it came with 4MB on board and supported a 4MB or 16MB additional module) but that was enough to do what I needed at the time.

I would have loved to have an advanced workstation laptop like in the OP article, but I didn't have $21k laying around for something like that.

>> "A whopping 128MB of RAM (in 1997, this unimaginable in a laptop)" [sic]

> Really? The PowerBook in 1997 supported up to 160 MB

I think it would have been pretty unusual to have that much RAM installed at that time. I remember my parents upgrading our PC from 8MB to 16MB at about that time (or maybe 16MB to 32MB), and that was more than any of my friends had.

The PowerBooks weren’t that far away from the Sparc boxes. I used to sell them at retail in college to doctors and similar folks. They’d frequently walk out dripping $10k on the Amex on the device, software, gear, etc.

I had a Toshiba Tecra that was loaded from a memory perspective and that device retailed around $4k.

Actually the TurboSparc based 3TX and 3000ST supported 256MB via undocumented factory upgrade... not sure how they did it exactly but it was official.

Might have been something as crazy as installing ram with a custom address line soldered on etc...

The 3GX from 1994 also supported 128MB but the simms had to be low profile and fast enough... so a bit hard to source.