Re: [Freecats-Dev] Introduction to Object Prevalence

[Yves Champollion]

> From: "Henri Chorand" <address@hidden>

> The idea is to forget, once and for all, about databases, by keeping all
> data in RAM (it should work for any reasonably sized TM, where the worst I
> saw yet was around 20 Mb)

There was a time (1983) when an IBM PC had one floppy disc and 32Kbytes RAM.
The floppy looked huge. The super-professional version had 2 floppies so you
could use "large" databases.

Then the first hard disks, around 10 or 20 Megabytes arrived (RAM exploded
to around 384 Kytes), so you could use really "large" databases.

Then they broke the 32-Mb hard disk barrier, and 100 Megabytes was the order
of the day (with RAM at 640 Kbytes+ extensions).

Gee then they had discs holding 1 Gigabyte (they said: people will *never*
use that much) and RAM around 24 megabytes (who needs that much?).

Etc :-)

Now our processors have more on-chip level-1 cache than the first PC's mass
storages. Henri, by the time you/we finish programming, they'll say, no-one
uses a 20-Mb translation memory- what is it worth? You really begin getting
leverage with 100 gigabytes, man.

Cheers,
Yves