The article begins with looking back many years. In those days there were technical limitations and clever workarounds. One MB was enormous. Today, what are t

The article begins with looking back many years. In those days there were technical limitations and clever workarounds. One MB was enormous. Today, what are the technical limitations? PCWorld's summary of by the comments in the talk lacks much insight. The article itself is misleading because it seems to suggest the goal is a "consumer PC". As I understand it the goal is a build machine, a computer whose purpose is to run a compiler. This is not a computer primarily for consumption. Graphics are optional. Here is how I understood the comments: 1. Need expandable memory. Not everyone will require the same amount of memory. For example, the kernels I compile only need about 200MB of RAM, max. But this might not be true for other users. Back in the PC days, users could add their own RAM. This concept has been lost on mobile phone manufacturers. Not everyone needs the same amount of RAM. 2. Need better secondary storage. I would guess the reason is not to supplement RAM i.e., swap space, but because source trees have become so large. This is a pet peeve of mine. I keep writing half-baked tools to reduce the size of source trees to only what I will need. If the trees were smaller, perhaps more customized, then I could fit them in RAM (mfs or tmpfs). On my RPi I never use SD cards as writeable storage. They are just where I store a read-only copy of the kernel and userland which I can load into memory. I pull out the card after booting. I/O via secondary storage is just too slow. Looking back at times past there was some incredible creativity to find ways to make due with limited memory. Today we have enormous amounts of RAM (and computing power) but I see little effort or creativity in getting systems to fit into these "constraints" (sheesh). The systems of the past fit easily in today's "minimum" amounts of RAM. The systems of today are still used by a majority of users for many of the same boring tasks as in times past but cannot fit into GB of RAM? Software is like a gas. It expands to fill space. Forcing one to keep purchasing new hardware. I guess that is the point.