A classic Monty Python sketch, in which four "old-timers" play oneupsmanship over how bad they had it in the past.  Also imitated on other sketch comedy shows, such as Saturday Night Live.

	 :	http://ayup.co.uk/laugh/laugh0.html
----
It's often, consciously or unconsciously, replayed by IT workers, mostly because of the rapid improvement in hardware and software in the span of one career:

A: Well, looks like memory consumption is under control.  The server ran all night, and never got above 250MB.

B: Heh.  

A: What?

B: 250MB.  I remember when we implemented an entire database-driven system that did the same thing, and our memory budget was only 32MB.

A: Yeah.  Of course, back when I started, most end-user machines only had 8MB of RAM...32 would have been a luxury!

C: ''(jumping in)'' Eight megs?  Eight megs?  I used to run a whole corporate server on a machine that big.

D: Well, I cut my teeth on a Commodore machine... megs?  Try 64k, a 1MHz processor, and three registers:  one could add but not address memory, and two could address memory but not add.

A: Ahh, you were lucky.  You had a Commodore 64, then?  I started out with a Commodore PET. 4k of RAM, and we used it to control an entire factory floor.

E: Heh... microcomputers. Now, the PDP-8.... ''that'' was a machine.  Put any of these Java kiddies in front of that and he'd be crying into his latte.

F: 4k bytes of RAM ? Wimps. Why, back in my day we didn't even have zeroes and ones. We had to use the the letter O and lower-case l's.

''...ad infinitum...''

----

I remember a round of this many years ago in alt.folklore.computers. After someone talked about keying programs in using front panel switches, the inevitable response was (sorry, paraphrasing from memory):

"Switches? Oh, we used to dream of having switches! In my day we had to program the machine by licking our fingers and shorting out individual circuits."

* "...and it wasn't any wimpy 3.3V (or lower) CMOS, either--this was using vacuum tubes, and there were 300V on those circuits!  We lost many a good programmer that way..."

----

I can remember when 250Mb on a ''server'' was considered large.... nowadays, the W''''''alMart-special PC has more RAM than that.  (And it still isn't enough to run WindowsXp)

''I bought a PC once, and '''upgraded''' to a 40 MB disk. $1200 (US) for the machine at the time.  Now 32Mb costs$20 and fits on my keychain''

* I've seen gigabyte memory sticks, etc. for under $100; and that's the SolidState variety.  You can get spinning-disk type keychain drives with several orders of magnitude greater capacity for a similar price.  In a couple years, this observation will seem positively primitive.



----
CategoryJoke