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Monday, March 9, 2009

Techosaurus Rex

Technosaur (n) A fossil that occasionally dispenses useful information about computers. During off-hours, the technosaur can be heard saying things like

1. "Hey, you kids! Get off my lawn!"
   and
2. "640K ought to be enough for anybody."¹
   and
3. "There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home."²
   and
   
4. "I'm sorry if I ever said, did, or thought anything that might offend our most revered leader Rush Limbaugh. My groveling supplication is that I may please be forgiven for this near-mortal sin."

¹ This is from an apocryphal tale that Bill Gates made that statement in 1981 while defending the woefully underpowered IBM Personal Computer. Gates denies saying it. That is the same Bill Gates who fudged, twisted, and danced around, the truth (an some say 'lied') when testifying before Congress. Note: 640 KiloBytes of memory was the ultimate in 1980s PCs. Today PCs frequently have 2 GigaBytes of memory. The newest generation of PCs can address up to 16 exabytes of memory.

                   640,000 = 640 KB (rounded off)
             2,048,000,000 =   2 GB
16,000,000,000,000,000,000 =  16 EB (actually, it's a bit more, but what's a quintillion or two among friends, right?)

² Digital Equipment Corp. [pre-PC mini-mainframe-computers] founder Ken Olsen actually said this at a 1977 World Future Society meeting in Boston. Olsen fesses up to saying that, but (like anyone caught saying something really stupid) claims that the quote was taken out of context.

posted by Recovering Republican® © ™  # 12:20 AM

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