I like to tell how Emacs standing for "eight megabyte and constantly swapping" was a joke about Emacs requiring a lot of memory, as 8mb of RAM was considered a

I like to tell how Emacs standing for "eight megabyte and constantly swapping" was a joke about Emacs requiring a lot of memory, as 8mb of RAM was considered a lot (i.e. the joke wasn't even claiming that Emacs took 8mb in memory, but that the entire system had a generous 8mb of RAM).