4 ms·
Yeah pretty sure I had a windowing Linux desktop on 256MB of RAM back in the day, which even seemed excessive.
by gizajob 2y ago
Yeah pretty sure I had a windowing Linux desktop on 256MB of RAM back in the day, which even seemed excessive.
- not_your_vase 2y agoMy family bought our first own PC in the early 2000s (maybe 2002?) - it came with 128 MB RAM, of which 32 were used by the integrated S3 GPU. I did install a graphical Linux on the whopping 96 MB RAM, and it did run reasonably well, without any issues that I noticed. (Granted, I deleted it a day or two later, when my 15 years old self wanted to play Diablo2, but couldn't install it on Linux)
- glimshe 2y agoReally back in the day you could have a windowed Windows desktop on 1MB of RAM. Going further, an Amiga could run a preemptive multitasking windowed environment in 256KB. I know the feature set is different, but OS requirements have become absurd - even for Linux.
- forinti 2y agoThe Acorn Archimedes had an OS with GUI in a 512KB ROM. That would be your BIOS nowadays.
- forinti 2y agoI've got a Pentium 166MMX with 80MB of RAM that runs DSL, but you can't do much with it. In college I used Sun machines that had 8MB of RAM and you could run X. I mostly coded in C. When I think back on those times, I realise you would just run one little thing at a time and that would be great. Nowadays you have a browser open, maybe music playing, a big heavy editor, maybe a database client, VPN, etc.
- forinti 2y agoBy the way, those Sun machines would crash if you forked more than 127 times.