alt Hacker NewsThe juxtaposition between this and "Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder" is probably the best one I've seen in a long time
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This right here! I commented about that in that thread, it's like: This 5G calls drops, LinkedIN uses GB's of memory, my fridge needs an update to get the light on but Voyager 1 is out there on 69kb.
That was probably an incredible amount of memory back then. And it probably cost $1,000 USD for 1KB. Who knows how much radiation-hardened space memory was. 10 times that?
We now have simple chat apps capable of doing almost anything LinkedIn does while using under 100 MB of RAM.
Voyager 1 is several orders of magnitude simpler as a product so it makes sense that it uses several orders of magnitude less memory.
To be fair, Voyager 1 doesn't have to render 47 "congratulate your connection" notifications at the same time.