My main observation is- what the hell were modern computers doing
with these resources? 512M RAM is clearly much more than I need
moment to moment- I haven't even fought with the 1981 lispm's 2M
physical memory limit yet.

The only bad problem I have hit is that I can simply not play
audio, though I appear to be able to record it fine-ish. However
my going theory on this is that in the absence of
multiprocessing, the basically never-used nice(1)ness needs to
be protecting my audio playback from all other processes.

Given that I have my 2-decade-old multi-CD-to-cassette recorder,
I think another strategy would be to burn tape/CDs in order to
have seekable audio. Streaming still seems to need a special
strategy, though screen recording doesn't- I guess historically,
rendering has had to function independently of other memory and
processing so it basically doesn't care other processes aren't
being nice(1).

Side note about tape- my reading is that magnetic tape continues
to dominate resource parsimony for recording and storing data,
though the tape tension and flexibility mean by its nature tape
wears out (and as a plastic, it disintegrates). Despite this, it
represents the lowest resource consumption. Modern magnetic tape
has exceptionally high terabytes of data density.

Not that it matters, hopefully, but the technology of tape is
also practical: You just have a coil of tape with some ironic
dust stuck to it. Then a magnetic pulse aligns the dust domains,
which can also be read by [Maxwell's laws].

I believe a floppy is basically a circle of magnetic tape, which
did not have to be bendy (increasing its life span). On the
other hand, you would need to change floppies for similar
storage space.

Please insert disk 12 and press return to continue.

I didn't manage to commune with brutaldon.praetor.tel. Need to
work on opening a lisp(ed) in a splitscreen with the lispm. I
am tempted again by the TCP chaosnet emulation as a generic
service model for my local ether. Imagine my x86 as a PDP-11
in front of a heavy PDP-10, or actually a gateway bridging
two of those (imagining each workhorse machine as a virtual
ether).

In order for them to be seaworthy, I will want to jail them,
and then onion route them, unless i2pd has suddenly become
easy to use which I doubt.

My topic wandered, but the lack of any motivation beyond
running a single process with megabytes of ram that is
the 1981 MIT-CADR lispm is crazy.

I guess live de/compression and bussing memory to graphics
acceleration are the sole modern memory hogs.


Addendum:

I am reminded, ironically, in mind of the lispm instead, how
Larry Masinter pointed out to me that no, modern computers
are about 1000x faster than 80s computers when I observed
interlisp had been clearly better than later microcomputers.

But 1000x nothing is nothing, as additive identity theorems
say.

The one barrier I can see coming is controlling modern
graphics memory from the 1981 lispm sufficiently to program
Doom in zetalisp.