[SGVLUG] 486s came with about 8 to 16Mb of RAM?...

[Dustin Laurence]

On Thu, May 25, 2006 at 01:28:45PM -0700, Robert wrote:

> I bought my first Zeos 386DX with 4Mb of RAM for $3k back in the late 80's
> early 90's, so I want to estimate that a 486DX probably came loaded with 8
> to 16Mb of RAM back in the day....

Well, the working specs on the PicoTux is 8 Mb of ram, so again it's
vaguely in the 486 ballpark.  That was kind of an extreme example,
though.  If you truly care about the environment and saving energy, I
suspect you'd be better off buying a Via box so you get a totally
bog-standard x86 architecture that you can run any ordinary distro on.
Even if you buy the slowest, lowest power one you can find (try ebay?)
it will be far faster than a 486, and I suspect (but am not sure) that
you'll use less power(1).  You will also get a much faster and better
computer, but since the performance requirements were specified as
something a 486 can do that doesn't matter.  The power supply rating,
which reflects maximum consumption when run flat-out, won't tell us if
this is true because the Via will spend a lot more time idling in a more
energy conservative mode than the 486 will.  The proposed use case,
email and web browsing, is going to leave the CPU idling most of the
time.

Or you can get a laptop with a 486 or pentium in it and plug it in.

Sometimes keeping old crap going is a very false economy, just like
keeping an old car going (I love old cars, but certainly the emissions
can be 100x greater than for a newer one).

> I remember paying $50 per 1Mb of 60ns RAM (simm) to upgrade to 8Mb of RAM
> so I could play with autocad v10 for dos.

Hmm, this is fun.  Last I looked RAM was about $100/Gb for desktops.
You paid roughly (treating 2^10 ~ 10^3) $50,000/Gb, so the price has
gone down by a factor of ~500.

Dustin
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