I don’t actually use the memory anywhere near as much as I thought I would. 256GB would be fine for me :)

Heh, my main "heavy stuff" desktop only has 64GB.

But it feels really good to have more ram than you can think of a use for.

I have a faint memory of an interview ages ago with Knuth I think where he mentioned as an aside he was using a workstation with 3.2 Gb of storage and 4 Gb of ram :)

Around the year 2001 I recall watching 3d studio Max R3 tutorials in which the teacher had an electric purple desktop which possessed an entire 4 gigs of ram. It blew my mind. My computer had 128mb and an ATI Rage 128 Pro.

I was young and dumb and never would have guessed I'd own a computer with 32gb of RAM that felt pitifully underpowered for today's tasks.

Humm purple and 4 gigs of ram in 2001 sounds like SGI. But those purple SGIs ran Irix so no 3d studio.

You're right! Crazy, that brings me back. I wonder why he showed it off. I wish I could find it. He probably wasn't using it for the tutorial at all, just nerding out and talking about how beefy computers handle rendering and complex geometry better.

I was constantly constrained by my computers back then. Trying to navigate complex scenes or model very detailed meshes could get soooo slow. But man I loved it so much.

> I wonder why he showed it off.

Probably because it ran Maya. Which was a SGI product back then, not an Autodesk product yet.

Ha, you nailed it. That's exactly what it was. Thanks for jogging my memory.

Back then Maya seemed like this unobtainable, magical machine for producing impossible imagery. When I finally got my hands on it, I was so disappointed to realize I still needed skills to make it do the cool things. I was ~16 and pretty clueless. I just knew Maya was used for the crazy stuff I was seeing in cut scenes from games or special effects in movies.

Took me until i was 20 and some change to give up.

I was much faster in 3ds max than my artist friend. But I was modeling cubes and he was ... actually modeling fantastic creatures and landscapes. So I stuck to programming and other text based activities and he's usually 'visual FX lead' in the gaming industry :)