At the beginning of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the protagonist is trying to sell 3 MB of RAM in underground markets. This is often cited as one of the ways the book has not aged well. But, looking at the direction of the memory market now… maybe we just haven’t gotten there yet.
Early computer scientists were so optimistic. They beleives with a few kh of ram and a mhz of cpu they could do anything. Ai, consciousness, ml, language, text to speech. Now we spend gigs of ram on web forms. So gibson saying yeay 3MB of ram would probably be enough for a consciousness in cyber space, is very optimistic but fitting.
I remember when Johnny Mnuemonic came out and he was hauling 320 GB in his brain and that was a WHOA moment.
To be fair, that's the entire text of Wikipedia in multiple languages.
3MB of RAM but 120PB of storage. Sure you're paging a lot but
Make your secondary storage smarter.
I like to remember that Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a typewriter and hadn't even touched a computer till (I believe) half way through Count Zero.
Not sure if "optimistic" is the right word - you could still do a lot with tiny memory or CPU footprint, but that's difficult to do if a large part of tech have adopted to either not care about the waste ("space is cheap"/ "the RAM would just sit there unused if I didn't use it") or lately even based technologies on the paradigm of using as much of it as possible. That was the explicit idea of bitcoin, but even AI development goes by the logic of "what would happen if we just made the model twice as large?"
The last iteration is "tokenmaxxing" where you try to spend as many tokens as possible first and then find out if it got you anything useful.
Minsky, in the 60s, thought that object detection / classification with a camera was worthy of a summer research project for undergrads. Maybe there is a classical algorithmic way to do so (I personally don't believe there is). But I would file that under optimism, since that problem realistically took massive amounts of data (PBs? XBs?) and Machine Learning to get decent at. IN the 60s I doubt there was enough compute in the world to solve that. Which is why I put it under optimism.
I saw a chrome tab this week that had Gmail with an empty inbox idling at 2.8Gb. Hard refreshed the page. Still 2.8Gb.
Maybe there is a parable here: don't fear the man that wants thousands of gigabytes, fear the man that only wnats 3 MB.
"Early computer scientists were so optimistic. They beleives with a few kh of ram and a mhz of cpu they could do anything." -- this isn't true, much less the stuff layered on top (conciousness!?)
Memory in particular is something that I've reflected on more than once as having the most impressive gains in computing since I started paying attention to it (networking/USB too, but that doesn't make your computer "faster" in the same way).
I remember being able to borrow a computer from somewhere when Diablo II had just come out in 2000 which had a 450Mhz Pentium III and 64 MB of RAM. 64MB of RAM was probably mid-tier at the time, i.e. very much not a given. As I recall Diablo II recommended 64MB for single player and 128MB for multiplayer (or above 4 players or something).
The computer I'm writing this on has 64 GB of RAM, 1024 times as much. By comparison I have a 20-core Intel CPU with up-to 3GHz speed or somewhere around there, even pretending each core could run at that max speed simultaneously (which they can't), that's only 133-times as much CPU power.
Maybe the NVMe read times are as/more significant than memory size increase, but the metrics on them isn't quite as front and center on PC specs as memory and CPU.
Hard drive capacity similarly impressive as RAM in terms of size (was apparently 10-30GB in 2000), but I don't have a 10TB hard disk as I don't need one that big (1TB is plenty for me), so again it's not as impactful to me as memory.
> The computer I'm writing this on has 64 GB of RAM, 1024 times as much. By comparison I have a 20-core Intel CPU with up-to 3GHz speed or somewhere around there, even pretending each core could run at that max speed simultaneously (which they can't), that's only 133-times as much CPU power.
Over that time CPUs have also increased their instructions per clock by 3 to 4 times, so the comparison is a bit closer than that. 5Ghz in CPUs is also common these days which would make it even closer. RAM has also improved in more than just total size though.
I completely agree. With everything from Out-Of-Order execution, deep pipelines, SIMD, huge CPU cache, etc... I would be surprised if the performance increase is not considerably more than 1024x.
GPUs are even more extreme. A 5060 is something like 15,000x faster than a 3dfx Voodoo card from ~2000 by my limited research.
> The computer I'm writing this on has 64 GB of RAM, 1024 times as much. By comparison I have a 20-core Intel CPU with up-to 3GHz speed or somewhere around there, even pretending each core could run at that max speed simultaneously (which they can't), that's only 133-times as much CPU power.
This nerd sniped me a bit. Your calculation on the amount of CPU power is too low, because of the change in IPC, but for the things we have benchmarks for, it isn't multiple orders of magnitude off like I expected. Looking at Cinebench 2003, prime95, and a few other benches, I get somewhere between 300x and 850x faster for the modern CPU over the Pentium 3.
For me, the biggest change in performance in my life was going from spinning disks to SSDs. That change felt bigger than any other leap by a long shot.
> Maybe the NVMe read times are as/more significant than memory size increase
This was the most impactful upgrade/breakthrough for me. The first time I put even a SATA SSD in my PC at home I was completely blown away. It still blows my mind somewhat the amount of compute I have sitting on my desk though, both in terms of memory and CPU/GPU power, but that move from spinning rust to solid state was huge.
Then Apple did to me again with the M1 launch and NVMe speeds that made swapping nearly imperceptible.
Me too. I distinctly remember saying that I would never own a non-solid state boot drive again.
The funny part is that a 1000x increase in RAM somehow doesn't make a modern computer feel 1000x more luxurious
that's only 133-times as much CPU power
akshually, it's also more closer to 500-1,000x. You can't look at clock speed only. Processor architecture makes all the difference. Pipelining, SIMD, memory bandwidth, blablala, everything got way better. Better approximation would be to use something like a synthetic benchmark or just (theoretical) FLOPS of each.
Otherwise, we can say that 6502 at 15Ghz is better than what you have now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22859706
That is a pretty nitpicking reason to say it has not aged well. Hamlet doesn’t have cell phones yet I think it’s an excellent play. Even though a quick FaceTime would’ve averted a tragedy.
So many plots in Seinfeld would have been trivially solved with cellphones. Get separated in the parking garage? Call each other. Need help carrying an armoire? Call each other. Trying to meet up at the movie theater? Call each other.
You still see this in many newer movies. If they are set in the present step one is "oh no, we have no cell service". There are so many movies and TV shows where the plot doesn't work if you have cell service or internet access.
Here’s another fun nitpick from Neuromancer. The opening line says the sky was the color of a TV tuned to a dead channel, which in Gibson’s day would have been analog static that looks like a messy grey from across the room.
But later, with computerized channel tuning, a dead channel was shown as a screen of solid bright blue, and even later, solid black. So different generations of kids have grown up with very different mental images of the background lighting for the opening of Neuromancer.
Hamlet is set in (what is currently) the past. It is self consistent. Neuromancer is set partially in the future, and partially what is our past. The inconsistency is what throws people. It can be a good book, but people might still find those elements jarring.
Hamlet is not a science-fiction story set in the future.
This is a shockingly ill thought-out comment tbh. I don't want to assumr you're an LLM, perhaps we can blame morning grogginess.
Ah, and we now see casual bigotry emerging from the anticlanker crowd. What a shame.
What are you talking about? Bigotry against a program that's literally incapable of understanding semantic meaning?
To say "anticlanker" sounds like you hate LLMs, or do you approve of them and you use that term disparagingly? I am not "anticlanker" I'm just a person who is aware that unscrupulous people very very frequently have LLMs generate comments and posts for them
Is this ironic are we actually calling shit talking llms bigotry?
no, we're talking shit about people who express their bigotry with anticlanker sentiment, calling humans (whom they disagree with) llms.
I didn't call that commenter an LLM, despite what I'd consider an embarrasing lack of mental model of what it means for a speculative fiction novel to age poorly. Who am I bigoted against?
so we're on the same page, here's how I read your comment:
"This is a shockingly ill thought-out comment tbh." <-- the casual bigotry;
"I don't want to assumr you're an LLM" <-- yes you do, dont be a dunce. this is the anticlanker sentiment.
"perhaps we can blame morning grogginess." <-- or it's an honestly held opinion expressed earnestly, and you did nothing to explain why you disagree, hence me calling your post casual bigotry
[flagged]
Lol
If I recall correctly, Gibson had never even used a computer at the time of writing Neuromancer, so that's perhaps not shocking.
this is my issue with cyberpunk “literature”
it’s a genre written by people who barely understand technology and consumed by even more luddite types.
it’s all uninformed fear mongering
It's certainly Literature. Shouldn't the quotes be more like '"cyber"punk literature', considering your complaint?
the games are more interesting imo. like deus ex or even cyberpunk 2077
on the contrary it's important for these people to be unencumbered by the technology of today to imagine the future. Imagine thinking in 1900 about flying, or even going to the moon in the context of what existed back then?
Then you should have a problem with science-fiction in general.
Can't you just read "3 MB of RAM" as a large amount of some scarce tech resource and move on?
What if you got a on-chip compression algorithm so advanced that you can fit a world in a few MB and now with corporations controlling memory distribution, 3MB of high compression memory is highly valuable in the black market.
"High compression memory" is immersion-breaking magic. There are hard mathematical limits to how much you can compress things (Kolmogorov complexity), and every lossless compression algorithm necessarily increases the size of some inputs (pigeonhole principle). It's much simpler to assume that "M" is slang for some bigger unit.
We already have the real life example of people using "mega" (10^6) as slang for "mebi" (2^20).
I've always wanted to set up automation that updates the text for the book every so often to preserve original intent, by changing the language around quantities to <whatever would make a contemporary reader be impressed>
Replace "megabyte" with "exabyte" or whatever.
As an aside, there's a great essay I think in Metamagical Themas about the fuzzy task of translating literary works, which takes up the question of whether it would be valid and how to translate say Dickens into French, by relocating from London to Paris.
Part of the premise is that this is an impossible task because the referential systems are not truly analogous; the cultures aren't identical so some concepts literally have no direct translation...
...in Neuromancer the mere existence of a bank of pay phones has stood out as one of those things which even my little updater would break hard.
Also related: I've seen a slowly increasing number of complaints in book forums about text from relatively recent novels being silently updated, to change references from e.g. Myspace to Tik Tok or whatever, to try to keep the text feeling current... a perilous slope.
It's funny... I enjoyed Neuromancer, although I didn't read it until about 15 years ago.
And, yeah, the memory thing hasn't aged well. Thing is, 1984 was a funny time in computing, particularly when you consider the kind of computers normal people had access to.
At that point even things like PCs and the new Mac had 128 or 256K of RAM[0], so I get that 3MB must have seemed like an ocean of memory at the time. And, realistically, more than 1MB of RAM in machines you'd typically see sat at home or on a desktop was uncommon until the beginning of the 1990s.
And, although Moore's law had been around since 1965 it's hard to know how aware people outside of specialist circles would have been of it in 1984.
I suppose Gibson must have done some pretty in depth research for Neuromancer, right? But the memory thing is sort of ancillary to the story, so how much would he really have focussed on that? Probably not much.
And then do you really want to harshly judge the book on that one slightly laughable thing, in other ways, it was incredibly forward looking and almost prophetic? Doesn't seem right.
I think the sensible position is you have to let it slide and see it as a possible alternative future that never quite came to pass in that way but that which we can see strong echoes and foreshadowings of even still.
[0] In 1984 microcomputers, as opposed to, cough, "serious" computers like the PC and Mac, with 128K of RAM were still very new, with 32 - 64K being the entry level, and if you had one with 128K you were king of the hill. 128K in 1984 seemed like a ton of memory to most of us, but it's worth bearing in mind that only a handful of years before computers like the ZX81, which had only 1K of RAM, were the common entry level, so the progression was already clear if you looked at the situation in the right way, but you had to have been paying attention for a while to have noticed. I remember the first time I used a machine with 4MB of RAM in, maybe, 1990 - an Archimedes at school - and feeling like it was just this absolutely inexhaustible ocean of memory. In 1984 3MB would have felt almost inconceivably huge unless you were in the high performance computing, or maybe the mainframe, worlds.
> But then Gibson must have done some pretty in depth research for Neuromancer, right?
Isn't he on record that his documentation was listening to techies talking shop in bars?
> And then do you really want to harshly judge the book on that one slightly laughable thing about memory when, in other ways, it was incredibly forward looking and almost prophetic.
He seems to understand humans. Gibson's world and Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar are imo the most "prophetic" sf books written so far.
> He seems to understand humans.
Yeah, I think this is it. The humans were the point, not the minutiae of the tech.
(Btw, I hadn't noticed you'd responded whilst I was editing my comment to express myself a bit more clearly - I hope anyway - so the quotes don't quite match but I don't think it matters, because the sentiment is hopefully clear enough both ways!)
> Isn't he on record that his documentation was listening to techies talking shop in bars?
Yeah. I don’t think he was a technophile himself. Which might have helped him because he was not trying to be realistic. But at the same time there are things he understood deeply.
It's sort of a cool idea. "Pre-RAM" without the tracking/AI integration so it can be used for clandestine activities in a dystopian future.
It's 3MB of "hot" RAM, IIRC. Makes sense.