Mag World - Mag Computer

[This episode sponsored by the Recurse Center.] A Mag History of RAM (1960–2025) RAM is a good proxy for computing power. Here’s every mag of memory from the Apollo Guidance Computer up to today’s machines — Nintendo, PlayStation, iPhone, and more. Remember, this is a log scale. (full write-up) Transcript Click to read the transcript for the episode. [0.8s] Saul: Hello and welcome to Mag World, where we like to ask big questions, make wild guesstimates, and quantify literally everything on a magnitude scale. Just remember that every order of magnitude is a big deal, because as we say at Mag World, quantity has a quality all of its own. If you wanna learn more about Mag World, come visit our website at magworld.pw. I’m Saul Pwanson, your guide to Mag World, and I’m here with my friend Mike, who’s used a computer. [27.5s] Mike: Yes, and I’m curious, are we going to use this one here during the episode? Should I turn it on? [31.8s] Saul: Yes, please do. [32.5s] Mike: All right. [47.8s] Saul: So today’s episode is Mag Computer. The good old Apple II booting up. Um, actually, we’re gonna need to be online for this. Could you log us onto the internet, Mike? [01:01.1] Mike: Uh, yes, yeah. All right, give it a couple minutes, but then we’ll be there. [01:17.1] Saul: It’s not that long. Okay, here we are. We’re online now. So computers are one of the topics that inspired Mag World in the first place. I mean, I’ve loved computers basically since I was born, and each magnitude of computer that I’ve experienced has had a quality all of its own. [01:35.2] Mike: Will you kind of explain to me what these different mag levels of computer are? [01:42.0] Saul: Yes, great question. So I use RAM as a proxy for compute power. Gordon Moore, you’ve heard of Moore’s Law? [

01:51.1] Mike: Absolutely. It’s something about the doubling time for processing power, something like that. [01:57.0] Saul: It’s actually about the density of transistors, that you’ll have m- twice as many transistors on an integrated circuit, and th- th- that doubling time being, I think, 18 months initially. And this was initially specified in 1965 and then revised in 1975 to be every two years instead. But it’s held true, or it did hold true, for some 40 years, and it might be flattening now, I guess we’ll still see. But the fact that it held true for so long is this exponential rise of compute. And because it’s about transistors, you need transistors both for computing power and for memory, and they kind of go hand in hand. So as your compute power goes up, so does your memory, and it turns out that you, you need more memory also to do more complicated things. Like, even if you’ve got the, the fastest possible computer but a very little amount of RAM, you can’t do very much with it, no matter how powerful it is. And so, yeah, I use RAM as a proxy for compute power, and order of magnitude RAM. So a mag 4 computer would be an Apple II that had 32 or 64 kilobytes of RAM, and then a mag 5 computer would have some hundreds of kilobytes, up to the classic 640K of RAM thing, and et cetera. [03:17.8] Mike: Okay, great. So we’re using RAM as this proxy, uh, for computing. [03:23.7] Saul: Mm-hmm. [03:24.4] Mike: And RAM is an active memory rather than a storage memory, is- [03:30.1] Saul: Yes [03:30.3] Mike: … my understanding. [03:31.4] Saul: Good point, yeah. So the iPhone is a mag 9 computer in my, in this nomenclature. It has a gigabyte of RAM, maybe four or eight gigabytes of RAM.

It turns out the most recent ones, uh, are, like, now, I think, 12 gigabytes of RAM. But they have, uh, not only that spec of RAM, the working memory like you’re talking about, they also have the storage, which is like your, your hard disk or your USB drive or something, right? And that’s more like the, the paper that you’re writing down as opposed to the, the brain memory that you have, the working memory that you have in your- [04:03.2] Mike: Mm-hmm [04:03.8] Saul: … mind. [04:04.9] Mike: Okay, great. [04:06.5] Saul: So I went to the Recurse Center a couple weeks ago. [04:08.9] Mike: Oh, what’s that? [04:10.0] Saul: The Recurse Center is a retreat for programmers. People go there who are interested in computing and computing technology, and they spend somewhere from, like, six to 12 weeks being in this community of like-minded people who are curious and interested about computers and becoming a better programmer. And I went through this program actually back in 2017, and it’s really a remarkable community, and I wanted to say that this is why we met. [04:38.0] Mike: Tell me. [04:38.6] Saul: I did this program in 2017, and I was so excited about having a community. I was so inspired that when I came back to Seattle, I intentionally sought out a community-oriented co-working space, which was Office Nomads. [04:55.0] Mike: Office Nomads. That was great. [04:55.9] Saul: Yeah. [04:56.2] Mike: This was- [04:56.3] Saul: Where w- I, and you were the first person I think I even met there. You gave me a tour of the whole space. [05:00.5] Mike: I remember when you came in, you were super excited to find a place. [

05:05.2] Saul: I mean, there were other co-working spaces, but Office Nomads was kind of special. It really had the community flavor, and that’s the same thing about the Recurse Center. There are coding boot camps, but the Recurse Center is very community-focused. [05:18.5] Mike: So more like a summer camp for adults than a summer school for adults. [05:23.9] Saul: That’s a great way of putting it. Exactly. Like, very much in their ethos is that you should drive your own education throughout, but not only at the Recurse Center and in school, but throughout life. And so they don’t have any curriculum. They don’t have teachers there. [05:39.4] Mike: Mm-hmm. [05:39.5] Saul: You need to be figuring out what you want to learn and then seek out the resources to help you learn that thing, and that’s one of the foundational, like, meta sk- uh, skills of learning, and they tout that very actively. So I’m bringing them up because they are our sponsor this episode. [05:57.4] Mike: That’s wonderful. [05:58.5] Saul: I will give them a very heartfelt endorsement. I mean, they’ve kind of changed my life. And so any of our listeners, if you’re interested in becoming a better programmer, I think the Recurse Center is actually a pretty fantastic place to spend a few weeks in New York City trying to become that. So I went to this alumni week at the Recurse Center, and I met some very interesting people there, as I always do, and I asked them about their first computer experiences. And so this is a little bit of a montage of what we got. [06:30.8] Recurser: I was working for AT&T in 1986. I was programming firmware on an 8051 microcontroller in assembly language that had 128 bytes of RAM, which I guess is a mag 2 computer. We burned EEPROMs. We burned PROMs. And, like, so the whole process of software development was very different.

It was, like, very design doc heavy, um, testing, like, really intense code reviews, and, like, a very formal QA because once you put it out there, there was no way to fix a problem. Uh, my first computer was an Apple IIe, which was a mag 4 computer, and downloading these ROMs, uh, that people would distribute over the internet, um, which meant connecting to our dial-up modem. Uh, you could only get, like, a few minutes on the internet at a time, of course, ’cause it took up the phone line, downloading these ROMs and then playing them in emulators, uh, with friends. When I went to college, this was in 1997, I was a computer science major, but I didn’t have my own computer. Like, none of us had computers in our dorm rooms. And so in order to do all of our assignments, we would go to a computer cluster on campus, and the computer clusters came in three different flavors. The most sort of formative experiences were, like, the nights before big assignments would be due, when you would find yourself in the computer lab at, you know, 3:00, 4:00 in the morning, and you knew that everybody who was in there with you was working on those same assignments, and that was, like, a real feeling of like, “Oh, we’re really in this together.” So as a child, uh, there I saw this button that said turbo on my computer, and I always, I never knew what it was, so I, I just assumed that it made the computer go fast when you pushed the turbo button. Uh, and surely if you could make your computer go fast, you’d want to do it all the time, so there must be a reason why the button exists. And I assumed that it was because it would wear the computer out, that, like, the computer couldn’t handle running at turbo speed, uh, at all times. Um, and I later learned it was because many of the games that were made for earlier computers depended on a fixed, uh, computer clock cycle. My first computer was a mag 6 computer, an IBM 386 SX 20. [08:52.7] Saul: Awesome. [

08:53.0] Recurser: With two megs of RAM. There, there was actually a really, uh, very active, uh, BBS scene in the area at the time. They would meet at a, a local Chinese restaurant every Saturday. There was people of all ages of life in there, too. Like, somebody figured out that I liked to program, and then I became the guy who would, like, add mods for the different BBSes. My first computer was a Windows 95, which was a mag 7 computer. I used it to play point-and-click adventure games like, uh, Disney’s Aladdin and Hercules. What ended up requiring us to get to the next computer level was that I bought World of Warcraft, and it required Windows XP as the minimum performance. My first computer was a mag 8 computer. I think that my parents were very against social media and Facebook and smartphones initially, and even gaming consoles, so the first console I even had must have been when I was 16, was a GameCube. [09:51.5] Saul: So we managed to run the gamut from a mag 4 computer, um, the first person was talking about the Apple IIe that they had, and then as younger generations use more advanced computers, and the most recent person here said they were on a mag 8 computer with, uh, hundreds of megabytes of RAM. And now, of course, we are at the modern computers are mag 10. They have a dozen, well, 16 gigabytes, 32 gigabytes. That’s mag 10 computing. And so we have seen over the c- well, over the course of my life anyway, eight orders of magnitude of increase in computing power. So I wanted to talk about my first computer. My father had a computer back in the ni- 1980. He got one of the very first, uh, computers. It was a TRS-80. I think that his TRS-80 was Model 1. It had four kilobytes of RAM. That’s mag 3. [10:49.7] Mike: That sounds very small. [