How much physical memory is on this Mac SE/30?

[+eebuckeye]

I assume the computer has 8MB of physical ram and 12MB of hard disk ram, correct? It seems confusing because the Total Memory is 12MB and to the right says 12MB used as ram on hard drive.

 

Thanks!

 

[Flojomojo]

You have 8MB of physical RAM and the rest is "virtual memory," essentially hard drive swap space. Oh, the dirty tricks we played back then.

 

8MB would have been a lot of memory back then. It likely shipped with 1MB and was upgraded later by the owner.

 

http://lowendmac.com/1989/mac-se30/

 

You can reconfigure the system to use less virtual memory, either in a control panel or perhaps a system extension like RAM Doubler. How big is the internal disk on your machine? A 20MB hard disk was a luxury in those days.

[+eebuckeye]

That is what I thought but I would have thought it would be reported as:

 

Built in memory: 8MB

Total 12MB

 

4MB used as RAM on hard drive (not 12MB)

[Flojomojo]

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/2804/why-did-mac-os-7-perform-poorly-with-virtual-memory-enabled

[carlsson]

So it is 4 MB virtual memory and then it mirrors the built-in 8 MB RAM on the disk, for a total swap space of 12 MB? Perhaps good in case of a sudden crash, that what was left in RAM can be recovered.