[GNC] Database storage

[Bruce Griffis]

Slightly off topic. In my earliest working days we had a Honeywell 
mainframe, were bringing in an IBM mainframe and had a Tandem system for 
airline reservations. The Tandem wrote to two different disks at the 
same time so if there was ever a failure, no data would be lost. One day 
I came in and heard reports that the Tandem was down. It was on raised 
floor, and some large tiles had been removed so someone could run cable 
on the floor. The cleaning crew had bumped into a Tandem and knocked it 
into the open space on the raised floor. The Tandem was down! By about 
12 inches if I remember correctly.

On 9/19/24 12:31, Michael or Penny Novack via gnucash-user wrote:
> On 9/19/2024 11:16 AM, Roberts K wrote:
>> In my experience the amount of data is relatively small (even for 
>> thousands
>> of records)
>
> A bit of historical perspective is needed, particularly because our 
> heads have not yet absorbed a fundamental change in technology.
>
> Back in my working days, the IBM 3350's (hard drives) held somewhat 
> over 300 mbytes each and our programs on the mainframe had about 10 
> mbytes core (the OS took about 6 mbytes from every program's virtual 
> space.
>
> So a large database might span three drives and only a tiny bit of it 
> at a time could fit into core.
>
> Now this Lenovo work station I am sitting at is ancient. The W541's 
> were the last of the W series. Still, this little thing I v=can pick 
> up and carry around has HUNDREDS of times as much capacity as those 
> three 3350 hard drives and it has many gbytes of core, enough to load 
> into core that entire database several times.
>
> We (NOW) load entire databases into core because we can. We didn't 
> before because we couldn't (and the ones that did work that way could 
> only handle small databases)
>
> Michael
>
>
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