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Orders of Magnitude

I don't know about you but I still can't get my head around the expansion of memory that has occurred with computers in recent years.

I have been working with computers directly for nearly 30 years so there has been a bit of a change. When the last desk top arrived with a 120 Gigabyte Hard drive I divided it up into some big partitions and forgot about it. At the end of last week it became apparent that part of the instability we have been experiencing was due to insufficient memory - we were nearly down to our last Gigabyte on the C: drive. Please note that the C: drive nomenclature has not changed from the DOS on the Mainframe Timeshare which IBM provided to us in 1978 - nor has most of the rest of the basic DOS despite Microsoft's "re-write".

What has changed is the amount of memory that is routinely available. On our system the thing that clogs it up is back-ups. Over six years of operation we have tried a series of different back up solutions - none of them have been totally satisfactory but then again neither have we ever had to make use of them! The clogging is compounded by different standards for acceptable file names - especially length which can make it difficult to move things around.

So a weekend of housekeeping has got us back into shape - defragmented space now abounds once more on the music machine - we just have to sort this one now.

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