More RAM

By Tom Kearney
We installed a terabyte server at the Stowe Reporter this week. In case you didn’t know, a terabyte equals 1,000 gigabytes.

A gigabyte used to be humongous, but now it has been subsumed by the terabyte. Which, you’ll be pleased to know, is the size and shape of a book.

Computers were developed in my lifetime, and I have childhood memories of Univac, the first commercial computer. People oohed and aahed at this marvelous invention, and TV shows filmed it in operation. It was the size of a mobile home —25 feet wide, 50 feet long — and it could hold 1,000 words. That’s right, 1,000 words. If you went beyond that, the data had to be stored on magnetic tape.

The newspaper I worked for bought a computer system in about 1972. It had a central brain, and eight very dumb terminals. It had one megabyte of storage space. And, since United Press International dumped its daily load of news, sports, entertainment, weather and what have you into that computer, it filled up every day. “System full! System full!” screams would appear on your screen, and everybody on those eight terminals would go nuts, killing off every file they could.

No photos, no graphics, no images at all; just words, text files, letter piled upon letter until you hit the 1-megabyte ceiling and had to start deleting.

Here’s how people thought about computer storage in those days: The 1-megabyte computer was about the size of a PC tower these days. But it was too small for 1970s editors; they couldn’t fathom how lots of articles could fit into something that small. The machines just didn’t sell.

So, the company mounted the computer inside a 5-foot-tall cabinet that was otherwise empty. Editors saw the cabinet, judged that it was a sufficient size, and the computer systems started selling like hotcakes.

My brother-in-law helped design the on-board computer for the Apollo space capsule that took Americans into space, even to the moon, in the late 1960s. The computer had 1 megabyte of storage capacity, and it was in charge of almost everything in the spacecraft.

Last week, the Stowe Reporter’s front-page photo — showing a group of cows — consumed 15.8 megabytes of storage space. You could have run almost 16 Apollo capsules with the space required for a single color photograph.

What is the value of memory? It’s a sliding scale, for sure.

For instance, I know Babe Ruth hit 714 home runs and Randy and the Rainbows had a hit with “Denise” in 1963. But of what value is that?

I have this image: My head is full of shoeboxes, each filled with index cards. When a memory question comes up, I have to rifle through the index cards until I find the answer: “714” or “Randy and the Rainbows.”

Of course, sometimes the cards stick together, or are out of order, and it takes forever to retrieve the answer. I can usually find it eventually, and I seldom crash, but I have reached this conclusion: I need more RAM.