On Sun, 30 Oct 2011 Dave Hill wrote:

I remember reading not that many years ago that 5 megapixels was about
the same definition as "professional" "film" cameras (remember those?)
and there was no need to go any higher.

OTOH, I have a magazine somewhere from the latter half of the 80s
which maintained that 64K of memory and 120 megabytes of hard disk
capacity would be enough to see me through my lifetime of computing
needs!

In the 1960s you were lucky if you had 32K bytes of RAM and 120 Kbytes
of disk capacity

In the 60's if you had a home computer you must have been time
traveling

Quite. I didn't see a desktop computer until 1979 when the school where
I was teaching bought the Commodore Pet. A couple of years later it was
a toss up as to whether I should get a Commodore Pet or a TRS-80. The
TRS-80 won because it was cheaper.

And it was supposed to be Bill Gates who said back in the 80s that he
didn't think anyone would need more than 64k of RAM. But maybe that's an
urban legend. I've got Bill Gates' book - I'll have to look it up,
though I'm not sure if all of it is to be believed. He claims to have
written the BASIC interpreter for all the desktop computers at that
time.

David

--
David Rance writing from Caversham, Reading, UK
http://rance.org.uk