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It’s just economics, really. 1GB of RAM was unfathomably expensive back then so if you wrote software requiring it you’d be dead in the water. These days RAM i

It’s just economics, really. 1GB of RAM was unfathomably expensive back then so if you wrote software requiring it you’d be dead in the water. These days RAM is cheaper than development time so instead of writing tightly memory controlled programs in C we write in e.g. garbage collected JavaScript. It's easier to learn and quicker to develop with. Part of me is broken hearted that the “art” of efficient programming is lost but it was an inevitable consequence of software becoming so central to our lives. (and hey, that same discipline does still exist today if you want to dabble in it, in embedded spaces etc)

jeffbee 3y ago
> 1GB of RAM was unfathomably expensive back then Well ... about $6k which wasn't astonishing for workstation budgets. These were machines that many people used to run software that cost $100k/year. A credit to the incredible expandability of this era of Precision Workstation machines is you could have expanded the model 620 to 3GiB of main memory, which isn't bad at all. With 2x Pentium III Xeon CPUs and 3GiB you could credibly use that machine today. All that RAM only costs $75 today.
bombcar 3y ago
I also feel "back then" it was quite easy for a enthusiast machine to be quite well past "top of the line" whereas now we've been in the 2-4GB "standard" for so long that most people have it - it's decently hard to have something surprisingly faster than "top of the line". E.g, I remember "recommended specs" for computer games that would ask for 64 MB of RAM; I had 128 MB.
- toast0 3y ago
  Something like 16GB is or exceeds recommended specs for most desktop things... But some people are running 64 or 128GB in their desktops. So, I think overkill computers are still out there. It is pretty hard to get ahead of CPU specs now though: used to be you could get server chips (and a server/workstation board) and have something that was clearly better in every area other than price. Now, desktop sockets get new architectures before servers, and server chips have more cores, but usually lower clocks and not everything will scale to more cores in a way that makes that better.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    That’s the main thing I feel - individual core speed is almost always the determining factor for “teh snappy” on modern desktop/single user systems.

jeffbee 3y ago

> 1GB of RAM was unfathomably expensive back then Well ... about $6k which wasn't astonishing for workstation budgets. These were machines that many people used to run software that cost $100k/year. A credit to the incredible expandability of this era of Precision Workstation machines is you could have expanded the model 620 to 3GiB of main memory, which isn't bad at all. With 2x Pentium III Xeon CPUs and 3GiB you could credibly use that machine today. All that RAM only costs $75 today.

bombcar 3y ago

I also feel "back then" it was quite easy for a enthusiast machine to be quite well past "top of the line" whereas now we've been in the 2-4GB "standard" for so long that most people have it - it's decently hard to have something surprisingly faster than "top of the line". E.g, I remember "recommended specs" for computer games that would ask for 64 MB of RAM; I had 128 MB.

toast0 3y ago
Something like 16GB is or exceeds recommended specs for most desktop things... But some people are running 64 or 128GB in their desktops. So, I think overkill computers are still out there. It is pretty hard to get ahead of CPU specs now though: used to be you could get server chips (and a server/workstation board) and have something that was clearly better in every area other than price. Now, desktop sockets get new architectures before servers, and server chips have more cores, but usually lower clocks and not everything will scale to more cores in a way that makes that better.
- bombcar 3y ago
  That’s the main thing I feel - individual core speed is almost always the determining factor for “teh snappy” on modern desktop/single user systems.