[snowwrestler]

At the beginning of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the protagonist is trying to sell 3 MB of RAM in underground markets. This is often cited as one of the ways the book has not aged well. But, looking at the direction of the memory market now… maybe we just haven’t gotten there yet.

[ecshafer]

Early computer scientists were so optimistic. They beleives with a few kh of ram and a mhz of cpu they could do anything. Ai, consciousness, ml, language, text to speech. Now we spend gigs of ram on web forms. So gibson saying yeay 3MB of ram would probably be enough for a consciousness in cyber space, is very optimistic but fitting.

[xg15]

Not sure if "optimistic" is the right word - you could still do a lot with tiny memory or CPU footprint, but that's difficult to do if a large part of tech have adopted to either not care about the waste ("space is cheap"/ "the RAM would just sit there unused if I didn't use it") or lately even based technologies on the paradigm of using as much of it as possible. That was the explicit idea of bitcoin, but even AI development goes by the logic of "what would happen if we just made the model twice as large?"

The last iteration is "tokenmaxxing" where you try to spend as many tokens as possible first and then find out if it got you anything useful.

[ecshafer]

Minsky, in the 60s, thought that object detection / classification with a camera was worthy of a summer research project for undergrads. Maybe there is a classical algorithmic way to do so (I personally don't believe there is). But I would file that under optimism, since that problem realistically took massive amounts of data (PBs? XBs?) and Machine Learning to get decent at. IN the 60s I doubt there was enough compute in the world to solve that. Which is why I put it under optimism.

[justaman123]

Do you think there's a possibility of getting more efficiency from existing hardware if it was used the same way that smaller amounts of RAM and processing were used in the past. Or because the rest of the computing landscape is so full of bloat it wouldn't even make much of a difference?

[dfedbeef]

3MB of RAM but 120PB of storage. Sure you're paging a lot but

[bigbuppo]

Make your secondary storage smarter.

[neonmagenta]

I remember when Johnny Mnuemonic came out and he was hauling 320 GB in his brain and that was a WHOA moment.

[goodmythical]

To be fair, that's the entire text of Wikipedia in multiple languages.

[sublinear]

It's probably still an accurate size for pharmacological test data.

[dvngnt_]

Well it was before electron was created so all they knew were efficient native applications

[brnt]

Maybe there is a parable here: don't fear the man that wants thousands of gigabytes, fear the man that only wnats 3 MB.

[satnhak]

I saw a chrome tab this week that had Gmail with an empty inbox idling at 2.8Gb. Hard refreshed the page. Still 2.8Gb.

[disillusioned]

Windows 95 was originally delivered on 14 1.44MB floppy disks...

[MadnessASAP]

I like to remember that Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a typewriter and hadn't even touched a computer till (I believe) half way through Count Zero.

[refulgentis]

"Early computer scientists were so optimistic. They beleives with a few kh of ram and a mhz of cpu they could do anything." -- this isn't true, much less the stuff layered on top (conciousness!?)

[jonathanlydall]

Memory in particular is something that I've reflected on more than once as having the most impressive gains in computing since I started paying attention to it (networking/USB too, but that doesn't make your computer "faster" in the same way).

I remember being able to borrow a computer from somewhere when Diablo II had just come out in 2000 which had a 450Mhz Pentium III and 64 MB of RAM. 64MB of RAM was probably mid-tier at the time, i.e. very much not a given. As I recall Diablo II recommended 64MB for single player and 128MB for multiplayer (or above 4 players or something).

The computer I'm writing this on has 64 GB of RAM, 1024 times as much. By comparison I have a 20-core Intel CPU with up-to 3GHz speed or somewhere around there, even pretending each core could run at that max speed simultaneously (which they can't), that's only 133-times as much CPU power.

Maybe the NVMe read times are as/more significant than memory size increase, but the metrics on them isn't quite as front and center on PC specs as memory and CPU.

Hard drive capacity similarly impressive as RAM in terms of size (was apparently 10-30GB in 2000), but I don't have a 10TB hard disk as I don't need one that big (1TB is plenty for me), so again it's not as impactful to me as memory.

[pedrocr]

> The computer I'm writing this on has 64 GB of RAM, 1024 times as much. By comparison I have a 20-core Intel CPU with up-to 3GHz speed or somewhere around there, even pretending each core could run at that max speed simultaneously (which they can't), that's only 133-times as much CPU power.

Over that time CPUs have also increased their instructions per clock by 3 to 4 times, so the comparison is a bit closer than that. 5Ghz in CPUs is also common these days which would make it even closer. RAM has also improved in more than just total size though.

[deeringc]

I completely agree. With everything from Out-Of-Order execution, deep pipelines, SIMD, huge CPU cache, etc... I would be surprised if the performance increase is not considerably more than 1024x.

[martinald]

GPUs are even more extreme. A 5060 is something like 15,000x faster than a 3dfx Voodoo card from ~2000 by my limited research.

[ColdStream]

It is a funny thing, while yes the task of 'put pixel on screen' is the same. They are so wildly different in how they function, I don't know how to even quantify it. 15,000x may be an understatement.

[eightysixfour]

> The computer I'm writing this on has 64 GB of RAM, 1024 times as much. By comparison I have a 20-core Intel CPU with up-to 3GHz speed or somewhere around there, even pretending each core could run at that max speed simultaneously (which they can't), that's only 133-times as much CPU power.

This nerd sniped me a bit. Your calculation on the amount of CPU power is too low, because of the change in IPC, but for the things we have benchmarks for, it isn't multiple orders of magnitude off like I expected. Looking at Cinebench 2003, prime95, and a few other benches, I get somewhere between 300x and 850x faster for the modern CPU over the Pentium 3.

For me, the biggest change in performance in my life was going from spinning disks to SSDs. That change felt bigger than any other leap by a long shot.

[ColdStream]

Yesterday I had to setup a rig for a massive down load that was larger than any spare SSD I had laying around, so I got a 2TB HDD out of an old PVR and turned it into the main drive for an old Optiplex I have.

I had forgotten just how slow spinning disks are. The delay on everything is significant. Even just opening the file manager has a few second delay, Firefox took something like 15+ seconds to load in once it loads all its dependencies, something I haven't had in over a decade now.

You start to wonder if it is loading, you just have to watch the HDD light or listen to the hardware to confirm.

[_carbyau_]

> you just have to watch the HDD light or listen to the hardware to confirm.

When I hit occasional delays - like opening a Windows Start menu or File Explorer - I still find myself straining my ears to hear that, despite no mechanical drives in use...

Now it's all calls to the internet.

[thewebguyd]

> Maybe the NVMe read times are as/more significant than memory size increase

This was the most impactful upgrade/breakthrough for me. The first time I put even a SATA SSD in my PC at home I was completely blown away. It still blows my mind somewhat the amount of compute I have sitting on my desk though, both in terms of memory and CPU/GPU power, but that move from spinning rust to solid state was huge.

Then Apple did to me again with the M1 launch and NVMe speeds that made swapping nearly imperceptible.

[longitudinal93]

Me too. I distinctly remember saying that I would never own a non-solid state boot drive again.

[ColdStream]

In a way I already knew it to be the case, I always built machines with an excess of RAM since hitting a memory limit and falling back to HDD would crush all performance. But once I got on SSD, it was the big game changer.

[Keyframe]

that's only 133-times as much CPU power

akshually, it's also more closer to 500-1,000x. You can't look at clock speed only. Processor architecture makes all the difference. Pipelining, SIMD, memory bandwidth, blablala, everything got way better. Better approximation would be to use something like a synthetic benchmark or just (theoretical) FLOPS of each.

Otherwise, we can say that 6502 at 15Ghz is better than what you have now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22859706

[bluedino]

> Diablo II had just come out in 2000 which had a 450Mhz Pentium III and 64 MB of RAM. 64MB of RAM was probably mid-tier at the time

I like to use Google books to refer to old issues of PC Magazine.

For $1999 in Feburary 1999, you could get the Pentium 450MHz desktop with 128GB of memory.

That said, I could do almost everything I do today on a similar machine back then. Surf the web, admin Linux servers, web development, edit video, play games, Photoshop, IRC, type papers...

https://books.google.com/books?id=mi_RGvUW6eQC&pg=PA108-IA3&...

[saratogacx]

128MB ram... Your hard disk could be upgraded to 12.8GB of total space for an extra $50.

Also, you get this _sweet_ 8MB nVidia 3d graphics card!

[Polizeiposaune]

128MB of memory, not 128GB.

[philipallstar]

> For $1999 in Feburary 1999, you could get the Pentium 450MHz desktop with 128MB of memory.

Damn capitalism taking us from that to a $699 MacBook Neo.

[BrtByte]

The funny part is that a 1000x increase in RAM somehow doesn't make a modern computer feel 1000x more luxurious

[overfeed]

When was the last time you used a vintage computer? I couldn't believe how long people had to wait for the start-up (and shutdown) processes; and there was no hibernation! (Windows 9x/System 7.x). Modern instant-on functionality is 1,000,000 times better than that

[tenarchits]

OTOH, MacOS before preemptive multitasking had incredible UI latency. It felt like the UI responded before you finished clicking the mouse.

[clownstrikelol]

When’s the last time you have?

Up until the end of the DOS era computers booted nearly instantly, doubly so if their OS was in ROM.

It was the heavy GUI systems that came around that made boot times quite slow.

There’s not a single modern computer that is ready for input as quickly as an Apple 2...

[overfeed]

> Up until the end of the DOS era

I'm sorry to break it to you, but computers after the DOS era are vintage. I specifically mentioned Windows 95/98 and System 7.x in my comment.

[teddyh]

In early computing history, the unit of memory was not established yet, and different hardware architectures had different word sizes, not even necessarily evently divisible by 8. And the memory sizes of these machines used to be expressed using the naitive word size. Like “this machine has 8 kilowords of core”. Therefore, when I encounter an anachronistic memory size in old fiction, I just assume that I just don’t know the word size they are using.

[walrus01]

Gibson was also not a microcomputer enthusiast at the time he wrote the book, and didn't know much about the inner workings of PCs that ordinary people could afford with a regular amount of money in the late 70s/early 80s. As I recall he said he wrote the book on a typewriter. He's also on record as saying that the first half of the sequel in the series (Count Zero) was also written on a typewriter.

edit: But regarding your specific comment, it's true that memory size wasn't totally consistent in how it was described or marketed. But in terms of computers that you could purchase and fit in your house, if you look at things similar to Byte magazine from 1982, 1984 or whatever, it was pretty consistent that desktop microcomputers were specified in multiples of KB of RAM like a 64KB or 128KB commodore (or at the very low end 16KB or 32KB for something you would attach to your TV), or IBM PC/Clone that would ship with 512KB or 640KB or 1MB of RAM, and the more expensive ones having multiples of 1MB, 2MB, etc.

[teddyh]

The first home computers were all 8-bit machines, and memory sizes were therefore always specified in terms of 8-bit bytes. (This use then continued as the home computer market grew, and later completely dominated the field as mainframes declined.) But earlier, non-home, computers were as I described.

[marcosdumay]

The ALU of a computer with a megabit word must be a beast to awe upon!

[em3rgent0rdr]

Star Trek used the fictional "gigaquad" unit of computer data storage, and conveniently deliberately avoided defining how many bits the base unit of a "quad" is, so they never would get embarrassed if such an amount of storage became commonplace nowadays.

[netburst]

3MB of "hot" RAM, stored in a cryogenic flask - a cold boot attack. He isn't selling RAM, he's selling data.

[fredsmith219]

That is a pretty nitpicking reason to say it has not aged well. Hamlet doesn’t have cell phones yet I think it’s an excellent play. Even though a quick FaceTime would’ve averted a tragedy.

[arijun]

Hamlet is set in (what is currently) the past. It is self consistent. Neuromancer is set partially in the future, and partially what is our past. The inconsistency is what throws people. It can be a good book, but people might still find those elements jarring.

[craftkiller]

So many plots in Seinfeld would have been trivially solved with cellphones. Get separated in the parking garage? Call each other. Need help carrying an armoire? Call each other. Trying to meet up at the movie theater? Call each other.

[mrweasel]

You still see this in many newer movies. If they are set in the present step one is "oh no, we have no cell service". There are so many movies and TV shows where the plot doesn't work if you have cell service or internet access.

[fc417fc802]

The lack of effort on the part of writers really ruins my enjoyment. Yes I thought I saw a suspicious person down a dark alley so I will silently separate from my group to go investigate on my own oh no who could possibly have foreseen this murder happening?

[snowwrestler]

Here’s another fun nitpick from Neuromancer. The opening line says the sky was the color of a TV tuned to a dead channel, which in Gibson’s day would have been analog static that looks like a messy grey from across the room.

But later, with computerized channel tuning, a dead channel was shown as a screen of solid bright blue, and even later, solid black. So different generations of kids have grown up with very different mental images of the background lighting for the opening of Neuromancer.

[blacksmith_tb]

Give it a generation, and readers will ask "what was a TV?" and/or "what is a channel?"

For us though, it's an evocative phrase - right place, right time.

[mNovak]

If I recall correctly, Gibson had never even used a computer at the time of writing Neuromancer, so that's perhaps not shocking.

[moomoo11]

this is my issue with cyberpunk “literature”

it’s a genre written by people who barely understand technology and consumed by even more luddite types.

it’s all uninformed fear mongering

[rf15]

It's certainly Literature. Shouldn't the quotes be more like '"cyber"punk literature', considering your complaint?

[moomoo11]

the games are more interesting imo. like deus ex or even cyberpunk 2077

[msie]

Then you should have a problem with science-fiction in general.

[walrus01]

This is about as logically consistent as complaining that the two authors who are James SA Corey didn't write an authentic science fiction book series in "The Expanse" because they're not in possession of an Epstein drive.

The early 1980s cyberpunk genre is a speculative fiction that blends scifi and dystopia/extrapolation of current cultural phenomena to some point in the future, don't twist yourself up too much about it.

[momoschili]

on the contrary it's important for these people to be unencumbered by the technology of today to imagine the future. Imagine thinking in 1900 about flying, or even going to the moon in the context of what existed back then?

[GuB-42]

What is the issue? It is fiction, it doesn't pretend to represent reality in any way. It is more about badass cyborgs than it is about fear mongering.

But it is dystopian fiction, a genre that has its roots in real society problems turned up to eleven. It is not realistic, but it tends to feel real because of how psychology works, the negativity bias in particular. Same idea with 1984, pure fiction, looks nowhere near modern society, but people will go out of their way to find similarities.

[overfeed]

GP sounds like someone complaining about gore/horror being written and filmed by people who never studied anatomy/physiology or sliced open cadavers. Accuracy is not the point of body horror, and fixating on it misses the point of the genre while patting oneself on the back. Same goes for Sociologists/romance novels and infosec folk/hacking scenes: remove your professional hat and enjoy the art for the fiction it is.

[ColdStream]

Side note. It is sort of the unwritten rule in TV and Film. Don't highlight technology unless absolutely necessary. it can age it considerably.

A few weeks back I had '30 Rock' on, it was funny seeing everyone with flip phones, it wasn't highlighted but it just makes you realise the age of it all.

[ryanmcbride]

I always just find stuff like that charming. I love seeing relics of the time in which something was made. I love seeing dated pop culture references, it's one of my favorite things about engaging with old media.

[paulddraper]

Same with monetary amounts.

Movies in 1950s: "For this heist you will receive a fantastical sum of $100,000."

Nowadays: "$100,000 is a mediocre downpayment in the suburbs."

[bcraven]

Austin Powers hung a lampshade on that very effectively:

Dr. Evil: Mr. President, after I destroy Washington D.C. I will destroy another major city every hour on the hour. That is, unless, of course, you pay me

[emphasis]

Dr. Evil: one hundred billion dollars.

The President: [bursts with laughter] Dr. Evil, this is 1969! That amount of money doesn't even exist.

[laughing]

The President: That's like saying, [with changed voice]

The President: "I want a kajillion bajillion dollars."

[philsnow]

I don't keep anything on my phone anymore. I use gadzorp.

[gchamonlive]

Can't you just read "3 MB of RAM" as a large amount of some scarce tech resource and move on?

What if you got a on-chip compression algorithm so advanced that you can fit a world in a few MB and now with corporations controlling memory distribution, 3MB of high compression memory is highly valuable in the black market.

[mrob]

"High compression memory" is immersion-breaking magic. There are hard mathematical limits to how much you can compress things (Kolmogorov complexity), and every lossless compression algorithm necessarily increases the size of some inputs (pigeonhole principle). It's much simpler to assume that "M" is slang for some bigger unit.

We already have the real life example of people using "mega" (10^6) as slang for "mebi" (2^20).

[fc417fc802]

> We already have the real life example of people using "mega" (10^6) as slang for "mebi" (2^20).

Off topic nit but that's not slang rather it's an example of conflicting technical jargon with an added helping of religious zealotry.

[aaroninsf]

I've always wanted to set up automation that updates the text for the book every so often to preserve original intent, by changing the language around quantities to <whatever would make a contemporary reader be impressed>

Replace "megabyte" with "exabyte" or whatever.

As an aside, there's a great essay I think in Metamagical Themas about the fuzzy task of translating literary works, which takes up the question of whether it would be valid and how to translate say Dickens into French, by relocating from London to Paris.

Part of the premise is that this is an impossible task because the referential systems are not truly analogous; the cultures aren't identical so some concepts literally have no direct translation...

...in Neuromancer the mere existence of a bank of pay phones has stood out as one of those things which even my little updater would break hard.

Also related: I've seen a slowly increasing number of complaints in book forums about text from relatively recent novels being silently updated, to change references from e.g. Myspace to Tik Tok or whatever, to try to keep the text feeling current... a perilous slope.

[snowwrestler]

And the bank of pay phones is one of the coolest little scenes in the book.

Put me on team “don’t update the text.”

Books are written in their contemporary cultural contexts. LeGuin said speculative fiction is about today even if the story is set in the future, and I agree.

So when you read Neuromancer, in some ways you’re reading a book that is about the 1980s in the U.S. So there are more fundamental anachronisms than just RAM and payphones, like a belief that east Asia had a lock on the future of advanced technology. Or that punk culture was cool and edgy and would endure.

[aaroninsf]

Oh, sure,

I am 100% not on team "quietly/secretly update the text" eg in ebooks...

...I was more thinking of this as an interesting "art" project of sorts, adjacent maybe to an annotated edition where readers can opt in to a different kind of experience.

For me the most interesting bit wou;d be the problem-space of how to "translate" the cultural signification across time, which I think we would agree is literally (heh) impossible and a dubious and Quixotic goal.

I think it was in The Mind's I that the open question of whether in translating Tolstoy one could and should re-situate the novel in London for English readers, or, re-situate Dickens novels in Paris for the French edition, etc...

...all of this just forces one to confront literary theory in a productive way.

Because I enjoy such theory and also absurdism it does feel like it would be fun to try in particular to produce an automated PKD-esque black-box automaton which duly tries via "AI" mechanisms to produce candidate translations for us of exactly those aspects of something like Neuromancer which are most significantly coupled to the time place and framing of its writing,

the landscape of features that were most problematic (comical!) to translate would I think also be a neat heatmap reflective of our cultural evolution from/diversion from that time place and framing...

[astrange]

You'd be stuck on how to update "the color of a TV tuned to a dead channel". Was never sure if that meant a starry sky or a bright blue one.

[fc417fc802]

Does that not refer to a complete and heavy overcast? A uniform gray from one horizon to the other without even a hint of where along its arc the sun might be.

[m463]

It's funny that some of the more hand-wavy books are closer to what is happening.

[rldjbpin]

as memory cycle goes, my money is on the eventual oversupply, and somehow websites will take gigabytes per tab in the end!

[bartread]

It's funny... I enjoyed Neuromancer, although I didn't read it until about 15 years ago.

And, yeah, the memory thing hasn't aged well. Thing is, 1984 was a funny time in computing, particularly when you consider the kind of computers normal people had access to.

At that point even things like PCs and the new Mac had 128 or 256K of RAM[0], so I get that 3MB must have seemed like an ocean of memory at the time. And, realistically, more than 1MB of RAM in machines you'd typically see sat at home or on a desktop was uncommon until the beginning of the 1990s.

And, although Moore's law had been around since 1965 it's hard to know how aware people outside of specialist circles would have been of it in 1984.

I suppose Gibson must have done some pretty in depth research for Neuromancer, right? But the memory thing is sort of ancillary to the story, so how much would he really have focussed on that? Probably not much.

And then do you really want to harshly judge the book on that one slightly laughable thing, in other ways, it was incredibly forward looking and almost prophetic? Doesn't seem right.

I think the sensible position is you have to let it slide and see it as a possible alternative future that never quite came to pass in that way but that which we can see strong echoes and foreshadowings of even still.

[0] In 1984 microcomputers, as opposed to, cough, "serious" computers like the PC and Mac, with 128K of RAM were still very new, with 32 - 64K being the entry level, and if you had one with 128K you were king of the hill. 128K in 1984 seemed like a ton of memory to most of us, but it's worth bearing in mind that only a handful of years before computers like the ZX81, which had only 1K of RAM, were the common entry level, so the progression was already clear if you looked at the situation in the right way, but you had to have been paying attention for a while to have noticed. I remember the first time I used a machine with 4MB of RAM in, maybe, 1990 - an Archimedes at school - and feeling like it was just this absolutely inexhaustible ocean of memory. In 1984 3MB would have felt almost inconceivably huge unless you were in the high performance computing, or maybe the mainframe, worlds.

[nottorp]

> But then Gibson must have done some pretty in depth research for Neuromancer, right?

Isn't he on record that his documentation was listening to techies talking shop in bars?

> And then do you really want to harshly judge the book on that one slightly laughable thing about memory when, in other ways, it was incredibly forward looking and almost prophetic.

He seems to understand humans. Gibson's world and Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar are imo the most "prophetic" sf books written so far.

[bartread]

> He seems to understand humans.

Yeah, I think this is it. The humans were the point, not the minutiae of the tech.

(Btw, I hadn't noticed you'd responded whilst I was editing my comment to express myself a bit more clearly - I hope anyway - so the quotes don't quite match but I don't think it matters, because the sentiment is hopefully clear enough both ways!)

[kergonath]

> Isn't he on record that his documentation was listening to techies talking shop in bars?

Yeah. I don’t think he was a technophile himself. Which might have helped him because he was not trying to be realistic. But at the same time there are things he understood deeply.

[AdamN]

It's sort of a cool idea. "Pre-RAM" without the tracking/AI integration so it can be used for clandestine activities in a dystopian future.

[kilpikaarna]

It's 3MB of "hot" RAM, IIRC. Makes sense.