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  • Author Author: kevinkeryk
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Micron 40th Anniversary

kevinkeryk

According to this Wikipedia entry here, today is the 40th anniversary for Micron:

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micron_Technology

 

So happy birthday to you Micron, you are really a great supplier to work with on several projects over the years!

 

I came across this very old flyer in a magazine I uncovered when I was cleaning up my office a few weeks ago and I wanted to post here to share my nostalgia with the community:

 

image

 

Interesting that although the technology has changed along the way, the need for more memory in a system will always be a timeless requirement from software engineers like myself. image

 

I am guessing by the memory density, this would ad would have been from sometime around 1995.  Any other cool Micron nostalgia available from other community members?

  • in reply to Gough Lui

    I remember using RAMDRIVE.SYS too.  It sped up compilers, as they used to write out multiple temporary files in the compilation process.  For a while, I found that running UNIX/LINUX offered a significant speed improvement offer DOS as it had a truely flat memory model and could access all of memory (4MB at the time).  It also allowed us a true network, while DOS still was working towards that goal.

     

    I too still use MS-DOS commands, but through the command line window available on Windows.  For years I still maintained a DOS machine in my office to run some of my old development tools.

    Gene

  • in reply to genebren

    Well, before that, I remember the days of doing tweaks to CONFIG.SYS to ensure I had HIMEM.SYS to allow for >640k, LOADHIGH as many device drivers as possible, freeing up as much conventional memory as possible, as well as trying to load DOS into HIGH,UMB. Later on, memmaker was included in MS-DOS to automate the process and make it more user friendly.

     

    If you had a tonne of RAM, you could use RAMDRIVE.SYS to create a RAM drive for scratch work, losing all data upon shutdown. This was useful sometimes to run some executables from or share some files over network without bogging down the hard drive which might be slow/compressed (as I used to, with DBLSPACE/DRVSPACE).

     

    But for me, I was always behind the curve in the 80386/80486 era, using disposed ex-business pulls to build my machines. Ran into BIOS issues with one of my boards, meaning that I could only top-out at 16MB of RAM in 72-pin SIMMs, which was rather devastating. That pushed me towards a Pentium 133Mhz system, where I managed to get 64MB in four 72-pin SIMMs. To find them in "rubbish" was like finding gold - just like the 500+Mb Quantum hard drives when most of the others were 240-270Mb in the era.

     

    Even to this day, I find my MS-DOS knowledge to be useful for the odd retro-task, which is a good thing.

     

    - Gough

  • Wow! This brings back memories (pun intended).  I remember buy memories in sticks much smaller that 1M, in handshake deals in a pizza parlor as I needed more and more memory to run my son's newest computer games (286/386 days).  The prices seemed even higher for these smaller memory devices than we pay now for sizes that were incomprehensible back then.  I remember the first time I bought a computer with multiple megs of memory and thinking what will I do with all this memory?

     

    Gene

  • in reply to kevinkeryk

    On a quick inspection, the ad seems to have 1M x 1-bit chips, of which there would be 9 on a single 30-pin parity-enabled SIMM, making each of them 1MB modules. So indeed, you probably are right, since the ad references 4Mb 30-pin SIMMS with parity (i.e. x9) and also 16Mb 72-pin SIMMS with parity (i.e. x36). What a shame, as I used to have more of them lying about, but in our haste to clean-up the house on a move, they were thrown out along with my old 486DX2-66 gear image.

     

    - Gough

  • in reply to Gough Lui

    Thank you for the info Dr. Lui!  That is an amazingly well curated collection that you have!  I agree, the memory in the ad in probably earlier than the ad itself since marketing folks are known to use older stock images image

     

    -Kevin