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It's funny. I objectively know that 9MB of RAM is tiny by modern standards and, indeed, has been tiny for decades now. My friend's dad got a PC with 32MB of RAM in 1996, or maybe early 1997, to put it into perspective.

But I can still look at a screenshot of Workbench 1.3 running on an Amiga 500 displaying "8831544 free memory" and it feels like an absolute ocean of RAM for that machine and that time and, most importantly, for the software that was available in that era.

Back in the early 90s I used to, with 1MB of RAM, code, play games, make music, do word processing, create graphics with both DPaint III (or was it IV?), and create vector drawings with a CAD package, create spreadsheets, create fractal landscapes with Vista, not to mention a ton of other stuff as well.

It is crazy to think of how much you could do with so little back in the day. But even this was a massive step change compared to the 8-bit machines I'd been using up to that point. These I'd mostly used for programming and games (although I did do a bit of word processing on BBC machines, and a teeny tiny amount of spreadsheet stuff). I did have a light gun for my ZX Spectrum but, boy, was it tedious graphics with (although I did do it), as compared to DPaint.



My first PC was an original IBM PC XT, with 640kb of RAM.

A friend taught me how to use a device driver (ramdisk.sys I think it was) to split that into two, and use 320kb of RAM as a "fast" hard drive.

I will install games there, and play with only 320kb or RAM (actually less because DOS used some RAM).

I had a 20MB Seagate HDD. 20 Megabytes.

Nice times.


one of my favorite long-forgotten benchmarks is the "3M Computer" [0]:

  - 1 megabyte of RAM
  - 1 megapixel display (1024x1024@1bit - black and white!)
  - 1 MIPS
... all for under $10,000. hey, a nerd can dream!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3M_computer


I had an old Tandy and the instruction manual touted “10MHz of Intel processing power!”

Still makes me smile.




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