In the early 80's, I worked for our local school district on Prime minicomputers. They supported something like 64 terminal users (up to 96 at one point), payr

In the early 80's, I worked for our local school district on Prime minicomputers. They supported something like 64 terminal users (up to 96 at one point), payroll, budgeting, student records, 2 simultaneous computer science labs of maybe 15 terminals each (a "port selector" allowed hooking up 96 lines on the terminal side and 32 or something on the computer side), the programming staff (around 8), 2 line printers running all day/evening, and had less than 8MB of RAM in the system - a Prime 4050 at the end. For disk storage, we had a 600MB, 300MB, and 770MB drive to store all the data above and daily attendance records for every high school kid. This machine ran COBOL, Fortran, PL/I, Basic, source-level debugger, and Emacs with a Multics-style paged + segmented architecture. Not saying it was all super-fast, and we did have to manage resources. For example, large payroll or budgeting jobs ran out of a batch queue, they had lower priority than terminals, etc. But in hindsight it seems rather amazing what got done on an 8MB system.