A Quadrillion Mainframes on Your Lap
I vividly remember the moment I was reading about the IBM mainframes used by NASA during the 1960s, trying to convert the words of memory from the amount of bits the system used, to something more modern to give me some perspective.<p>Naturally, I fired up [Microsoft] Calculator, and arrived at something like 4kb. Later, I had to force quit a stalled process and opened Task Manager, to find that I had forgot to close Calculator.<p>There it was, idling at 20mb. Initially, I thought perhaps it was slowly leaking memory, so I restarted it. Just the same.<p>Now, I can already anticipate someone motivating why a calculator needs to exceed the computing power of calculating ~5000 space programs. To that I say, Windows 95 runs at 4mb of memory. Microsoft Calculator is not more complex than Windows 95. At least, I deeply hope that it isn't.