I was just reading this funny post over at Haacked's place [go read the post now, then come back here] about a guy who back in 1998 wrote a program on his laptop to calculate pi to the billionth digit and the calculation took 7 years!

Long story short - he forgot to output the result of the calculation, and Phil suggests that possibly the bozo stored all one billion digits in a string and then forgot to display that string.

Now, I know Phil meant for this to be a funny/amusing post... but my inner geek is just screaming too loud to ignore, so --

A quick calculation... assuming the programmer did choose to store them all to a string, that string would have (assuming an encoding with 8bits/character) would result in a string that is nearly a Gigabyte in size - 953.67 MB, give or take.

Notice that the original author said it was running on (he thinks) a PII, and the machine seems to have been his *old laptop* as he got a new one the next day.

Now, I believe it unlikely that it was truly a PII as they didn't debut until May 1997, and wouldn't have been available in laptops until later than that year. AND, I doubt he was replacing a one year old machine... unless he just had money to burn (if so, contact me b/c I'm not above taking a hand-out).

However, for the sake of argument, let's give the guy the benefit of the doubt and say it was a PII, circa mid '97 - late '98. My question to all of you is...

Would a laptop from this era have the amount of RAM it would have taken to store such a large string (plus the rest of Windows 98's huge-ness)? Would it have even had that kind disk space to page to?

I think my first desktop PC from my frosh year of college (in fall of 1999) was a top-o-the line PIII and maxed out at just 512MB RAM with only a 10 or so GB HDD. So, what do you all think?