standing in line for my daily allotted ration of 640kb of RAM

[jmax@mastodon.social]

@eniko Shh. Don't say that so loud; it's not safe. There are desparate LLM junkies in this town who'll kill for 1kb.

[rootwyrm@weird.autos]

@eniko due to the latest antics by <just gestures> the daily allotment has been reduced to 512Kb.

[curiously@mastodon.au]

@eniko at front of line, there is no RAM today, only discount voucher to briefly rent the RAM from the LLM that bought yours for x15 times the cost (after discount).
The best the Black market dude in the alley behind has is iomega Zip discs.

[vonxylofon@witter.cz]

@rootwyrm @eniko The party has increased the daily allotment of RAM to 320 kB.

[nazokiyoubinbou@urusai.social]

@eniko No one could ever possibly need more than 640KB!*

*It turns out no one actually said that, but it's still a meme anyway.

[nazokiyoubinbou@urusai.social]

@curiously @eniko I'm trying to imagine how bad swapping on zip disks would be and I am utterly failing to imagine how horrible it would be.

Like, at a certain point some things would start timing out as they "hang" while waiting and the OS would start trying to kill them wouldn't it?

[lilyyllyyllyly@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@eniko are you using the fabled commodore 640?!?

[curiously@mastodon.au]

@nazokiyoubinbou @eniko I think that the caffeine induced psychotic break from making your 163rd cup to tea from the several minute pause whenever you tried to launch an app, save a file or export any data would kill the process as you slammed it against the wall screaming manically

[nazokiyoubinbou@urusai.social]

@curiously @eniko You know, jokes aside, I actually have a bit of experience of how horrible this type of thing can get. Oh it wasn't on a zip disk or even anything as horrible as, say, tape, but I did run Windows 3.1 on a 286 once. Turns out you can actually do so if you run it in "standard mode." (win /s)

I don't know the exact specifics of how it works, but as far as I can tell it has to swap back and forth practically everything almost continuously. It literally took something like 15 minutes to even just start. Literally. Just to start. (Ironically it would run kind of ok with really simple stuff once it did start, but when I typed win /s I got up and walked away to do literally anything else for a while...)

[curiously@mastodon.au]

@nazokiyoubinbou @eniko as a kid I remember these IBM stacked platter hard drives. They had tolerances of a few degrees C and lived in an aggressively air conditioned room with the mainframe that had about 8 users in an early CAD system. If they all sent rendering or pathfinding requests the extra heat would buildup and would nudge the head float distance and they'd drop into failed write, verify, attempt rewrite loop. A couple of techs would attempt to surf the aircon temps the rest would play table tennis because it was going to several matches before anything would process

[hannah@moonserver.yorha.nexus]

@eniko@mastodon.gamedev.place Bold of you to assume that it actually is 640kb ​​

[yngmar@social.tchncs.de]

@eniko Hey kid, wanna try a HIMEM.SYS?