In the old days, memories were small and expensive. The IBM 1130, a minicomputer that IBM introduced in the mid-1960s, had 8 Kilowords, each word 16 bits long, giving it 16K bytes. About 15 years later, in 1981, another popular small, but cheaper, IBM computer, the IBM PC, was introduced with 16K memory. Just 15 years after that, 1996, many students have portable computers weighing 6 lbs and boasting 8 Megabytes of memory. That is 512 times as big as the venerable IBM PC. However, a strange thing happened on the way to the present -- programs as well as memories got much much bigger. In fact, many people cannot subsist on a mere 8Mb of memory anymore. Windows 95 needs at least 16 meg. Though we can run some of the largest 1981 programs with ease on today's computers, we still need bigger and bigger memories for tomorrow's applications. |