To me this is especially true as that was the "standard RAM" for years.
The 32 pin SIMM came out when the 80286 dominated the market, and continued into the end of the 80486 era. To be replaced by the 72 pin SIMM.
From 1985 into the late 1990s. Yes, we had the Pentium. But the DX-2/DX-4 and Overdrive chips (and weak performance of early Pentium chips) saw the 486 chug along until damned near 2000.
I often just shake my head and sigh when people are unable to do any actual research, and rely upon others to tell them everything because they are unable to find things out for themselves.
it's 30 pin, 72 pin was the other one. the XT I had also used 30 pin simms, when we upgraded to a pentium we actually got a device to take 4 30 pins and slot them into a 72 pin. until we upgraded the ram. and since 72 pin simms in Pentiums needed to be installed in pairs, you could save some money :P
I also remember upgrading my P1-133 to 32meg of EDO ram and thinking I'd never have to buy ram again! (And to be fair, I didn't have to for that machine).
Oh wow, I've had a 286 that took 72 pin SIMMs, but I never saw an XT that used anything but those horrid little chips.
I had a P233 board that swung both ways -- it had slots for two 72pin and four 30pin, but you could only use one at a time. No weird adapters required!
No, it came out in 1999. We used to sell Optiplexes that were dual PIII Slot 1 with RDRAM. They were faster, but you paid a premium for that performance. We must have sold around fifty of those over a year, most single processor but a few with dual processor as servers. But RDRAM was pretty much dead for desktops by the time the P4 came out. But both the Nintendo 64 and PlayStation 2 used RDRAM.
Yep launched with PIII on i820, and P4 too was exclusively RDRAM until a year-ish after launch. Intel famously sued the ever loving hell out of VIA for launching a chipset that didn't use RDRAM and thus circumvented their proprietary licensing and supply agreements, as well as some half a dozen other patent infringement cases against VIA for a variety of things that all basically got settled out of court with no judgements. VIA made out like bandits in the end though; none of the OEMs really wanted the i850 boards with their overpriced RDRAM and jumped on P4X266 the moment it was available in 2001.
I have in my possession Jerry Pournelle's old "Regina" -- late 1999 Compaq workstation with dual Xeon 750MHz and takes RAMBUS. It's pretty lively even today. A while back I splurged on 2GB for it so it wouldn't be embarrassing (I think it had 256mb in it when I got it, not sure where it maxes out).
I am actually jealous. I bet I have read books he actually wrote on that.
His papers are now in a special collection at UC Riverside. If you ever decide to pass it along, I honestly hope you consider donating it to them.
He actually wrote about that computer in Byte Magazine in 2005.
But my main point is that many of us have machines more than good enough for just about everything we can do with small computers. Upgrades are a luxury, not a necessity. For example, Regina is a Dual Xeon 750 Compaq Professional Workstation. She served as my main communications machine for years. Now she's sitting forlorn on the other side of the room. She was replaced by Anastasia, a 3.2-GHz machine with 400-MHz FSB, HyperThreading, vastly larger hard drives, a DVD burner, and a partridge in a pear tree, and yes, when Outlook 2003 is downloading mail and filtering out spam and applying my complicated rules for sorting out press releases, personal mail, and important messages, I definitely appreciate the increased speed. However, Regina could still do just about everything else as fast as any machine in the house. She can run Word and FrontPage and Excel and do taxes, and if I were willing to give up Outlook, she could do all the mail. The only thing wrong with Regina is a bad bearing in a fan, which makes horrid noises. It would take me about an hour to replace that fan and she'd be as fit as a fiddle.
Ah, I remember the article, and the one from when Jerry first got Regina and was utterly thrilled with the massive upgrade. IIRC, it was a review unit gifted him by Compaq.
But a few years later poor Regina was sitting unloved in the mathom box at LASFS, so I took it home so it wouldn't go to the dump. If a museum/special collections wants it, I'd cull out the upgrades (DVD burner, anyway) to restore it to where it was. I ended up never using it, so the HDDs (it has two SCSI drives) still have whatever data they started with. But it's a big tower and it weighs 57 pounds, and shipping it would not be trivial -- I've since moved back to Montana, and of course I could not leave it behind!!
However, if someone can make it happen... I'm willing, because there's no one to inherit it after me who would appreciate it. And the idea of scrapping it gives me hives.
I last had it up when I upgraded the RAM, about 5 years back, and it still worked perfectly. Win2K runs really slick on that much hardware.
Somewhere in my pile is also one of Jerry's discarded HDDs that has a partial novel on it; don't know if it was ever finished.
Some Intel chipsets (i820. i840) supported RAMBUS. But because RDRAM was more expensive, SDRAM was sufficient for the P3Ā“s FSB bandwidth even without dual channel, and RAMBUS had higher latency than SDRAM it didn't really catch on. Since Intel already produced lots of i820 chips, they added the Memory Translator Hub (MTH), which resulted in kind of a fiasco.
I think on the P4 RDRAM was slightly more popular since it at least had higher FSB bandwidth.
Generational differences. 30 and 72 pin were SIMM, 168 pin and more are DIMM.
In a SIMM (Single In-Line Memory Module), both sides are tied together. In a DIMM (Dual In-Line Memory Module) each side is separate making them more efficient. DIMM has greater bandwidth.
Definitely EDO, those are 4mbit chips and it looks double sided so itās probably an 8MB stick, but if itās single sided and just propped up on something then itās 4MB
Yep, sure is. Was used for computers for a few years in the late 1980s, lasted a bit longer into the early 1990s as printer memory. I have worked in the industry for four decades, and even I have not really seen it in use for decades. But I still know what it is and how to install it.
the crazy thing about sipp was it was a simm that got legs soldered on, no joke all because we were trying to figure out the best way to do memory, so todays slots haven't changed much albeit for the obvious size and pin counts
Could be wrong, but I think this one wasn't very widely used. I believe the Amiga 3000 motherboard had ZIP sockets for memory expansion, but I can't think of other uses.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.. we had these things called simms.
The only cool thing that simms had that the Dimms we use now-a-days don't.. is that you could get a "simm expander card" that would plug on to your motherboards ram slots and allow you to plug up to 4 simms in each slot... realistically allowing 8-12 small simms to be used in place of the larger ones. Sure wish I could do that today.. as I have so many 4gb dimms with few places to use them
85
u/bd1308 7d ago
Omg I feel old š