> on Pentium II > and now you’re talking about developer tools on a Pentium 4. It's to illustrate that arguments are wrong: it's Decade who uses "256 MB" as

> on Pentium II > and now you’re talking about developer tools on a Pentium 4. It's to illustrate that arguments are wrong: it's Decade who uses "256 MB" as an argument which is not "small memory" for Pentium II, and I illustrate that it was common in 2002 for notebooks, the time when Pentium IV was common for developer machines. > The ggp post was about doing all sorts of Internet programs at the same time on Pentium II era computers Let me check again: "For example, IM, video/audio calls, and working with email shouldn't take hundreds of MB of RAM, a GHz-level many-core processor, and GBs of disk space. All of that was comfortably possible --- simultaneously --- with 256MB of RAM and a single-core 400MHz Pentium II." OK. That is also obviously a bit off. 256 MB with Pentium II is quite a lot, as I showed 256 MB was normal even in 2002 for notebooks, as Pentium III was already common on notebooks and IV on desktops. Working with email -- at that time e-mail clients, if they used html at all, were limited to html formats of that time so "using email" completely worked, no crashes of system on NT (Outlook did have a limit of single PST having to be less than N GB, I remember that). IM too just worked, and also without crashes on NT. That leaves "video/audio calls". Video calls were surely not common at that time, and I personally also haven't used audio calls. But the "stability" problems you claim to have been common definitely didn't exist the way you claimed, as soon as one used NT, that is, since around 1994, or later on Windows 2000 or even later on XP or Server 2003, all NT-based. And as I've said, it was not that "too much" RAM was needed, as I've run NT on 8 MB with no problem. So I still don't understand why you continue to stick to the narration that was simply not true. No, it was not that bad like you claim. Computers were quite stable even then for those who knew what they were doing. On NT, almost nothing crashed the system, except for failed hardware. Like I've said, it was that some apps were indeed less stable, like Word crashing or saving the invalid DOC file. But Excel, for example, while being in the same "suite" I don't remember to have ever crashed. I also don't remember browsers actually crashing, just the pages downloading very, very slowly.