Yorkshireman Sketch

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 WalMart-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