Brett Gideon: Showing my age

I was at an HP launch last week, which in addition to some very tasty pizza had a wide range of computers from business notebooks right through to touch screen consumer desktops but the section I liked the most was the table full of Z Series workstations.

I used to sell and build powerful PCs to be used as design workstations in the days when a Pentium 2 – 266 was a VERY serious machine, so you’ve got an idea of how far back I’m going. What blew me away was the expandability of the top off the range unit, which supports 7Tb of onboard hard drive storage and a massive 192Gb of RAM. Sorry? That’s one hundred and ninety two gigabytes of memory? In a box that isn’t intended to be a server, just a solitary computer for processing HD video files.

I must be getting old because the first RAM upgrade I ever bought was an 8Mb (yes megabyte) SIMM module for a 486 DX2-66 machine. That SIMM cost me a fairly substantial sum and doubled the memory of that PC to a mighty 16Mb, so the idea of 192Gb of RAM makes my head spin, 192Gb was a big hard drive a few years back.

It’s scary to think what will be considered a high end workstation in five years. I’m too nervous to venture a guess but as I sit here processing RAW files on my outdated 1.5GHz/768Mb laptop, one of the entry level workstations is sounding like a good idea. I used to dream of a time when I wouldn’t have to stare at a spinning hourglass while my computer ground away at a graphics file, now the day is here when I may not even have to see an hourglass at all. Ever. Do we live in wondrous times or what?