They really meant it

when they said Visual Studio 2005 needs a gig of memory. I've been using VS6 since it was released way back in 1998 and VS.NET 2003 for about 2 years; they both work well on my system, which is a 3 and a bit year old dual Athlon MP with half a gig of memory. The IDEs run smoothly and I never wait more than a split second for em to notice that I've changed views. Indeed, VS6 positively screams on a dual proc 2GHz system.

Not so for VS2005. I like what I see; the problem is that I get to see it for far too long whilst waiting for the paging subsystem to catch up. Its slow enough in half a gig that I'm going to hold off on actually using VS2005 until I can afford to double the memory space. That's not as high in the financial queue as finding the US$390 for the citizenship application!

On the other hand I don't want to sound like a luddite. Visual C++ 1.5, when it came out, probably required resources beyond the average; I don't remember. I do recall that in those days 16 megs was high end and installing VS 1.5 from floppies (all 20 of them) took over eight hours if you hadn't had the foresight to install Smartdrive. Installing Smartdrive cut the install time to 2 hours!

My impatience at the performance of VS2005 in half a gig of memory merely tells me that it's time I added memory; I'm not, for the nonce, at the cutting edge!

Sometime in the early 90's the first Pentium machine arrived at Unisys Melbourne. I think it was a 60 MHz box. At the time we had a saleswoman, Sue Anne, on the team. Most unusual for those days. Some of the younger guys grabbed the new machine and ripped the covers off so they could gaze their fill on that purple ceramic wonder. No cooling fans need in those days!

I remember watching Sue Anne watching them crowing over the new processor. She was moving her hips back and forth in a deliberately suggestive manner, chanting "Pentium, Pentium". She knew I was watching. We laughed.