You probably have a computer desktop or laptop with at least 4GB of RAM. Well, to have that amount of memory in the 50s, you would have needed the space of a warehouse.
In 1963, the Apollo module for the lunar exploration had computers on board with a total amount of 4kB of RAM. You read it right, no typos: 4kB! That memory was made out of ferrite modules. They could not put more because of the weight!
Even in the late 1970s, when I was in college, the mainframe I had access to, to learn programming, had a central RAM of 2MB, which at the time was considered a huge amount. That memory was allocated along with the CPU in the same cabinet, of course, and that cabinet was about 5 cubic meters big. Those 2MB took most of the space inside the cabinet. (5 cubic meters is about 180 cubic feet).
Just to make you understand the sizes of the memory back then, here is a picture of a 128 bits module:
The actual size of this module is 50×50 mm or about 2×2 inches. You needed 8 of these modules to make 1kB. Not to mention the circuitry to power it up and use it.
It took a long time before the first RAM modules were made of transistors, but once that step was done, things started changing very fast.
The Commodore VIC 20, that came out in 1980, was equipped with a whopping 5K of RAM, a lot for a computer for the masses. Before that, the PET Commodore was equipped with 4K of RAM, but that was originally designed to be an office computer. Also the famous Apple 2, which came out in 1977, had 4 K of RAM.
But that didn’t last long, and soon the first computers equipped with 64K started coming out. Remember the Commodore 64, the ZX81, and many others.
My first IBM compatible PC , back in 1990 was equipped with two memory modules for a total of 2MB, which I later expanded to 10MB. That was huge at the time.
And again, just a few years later, PCs equipped with 64MB and 128 MB became the norm. And today, where no one would buy a computer with less than 4GB!
Things have changed a lot. First slowly, and then faster and faster. The technology evolved exponentially and was able to give us more power, more speed, and more memory.
Today having amounts of memory in the order of Gigabytes is a necessity, not anymore a luxury, and that because all today’s programs use a lot of graphics, which needs so much memory.
And it all started with some small rings of ferrite, that were manually assembled with thin wires going through them to allow electric current to magnetically polarize them one direction or the other, to represent those 1s and 0s.
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