2 ms·

Buy why that much? The first computer I bought had 192MB of RAM and I ran a 1600x1200 desktop with 24-bit color. When Windows 2000 came out, all of the transpar

Buy why that much? The first computer I bought had 192MB of RAM and I ran a 1600x1200 desktop with 24-bit color. When Windows 2000 came out, all of the transparency effects ran great. Office worked fine, Visual Studio, 1024x768 gaming (I know that’s quite a step down from 1080p). What has changed? Why do I need 10x the RAM to open a handful of terminals and a text editor?

winrid 7mo ago
Higher res icons probably add a couple hundred megs alone
- Lerc 7mo ago
  Well if you have a 512x512 icon uncompressed it is an even megabyte, so that makes the calculations fairly easy. But raw imagery is one of the few cases where you can legitimately require large amounts of RAM because of the squaring nature of area. You only need that raw state in a limited number of situations where you are manipulating the data though. If you are dealing with images without descending to pixels then there's pretty much no reason to keep it all floating around in that form, You generally don't have more than a hundred icons onscreen, and once you start fetching data from the slowest RAM in your machine you get pretty decent speed gains from using decompression than trying to move the uncompressed form around.
  - winrid 7mo ago
    Aren't they usually all preloaded to prevent pop-in (or using some sort of heuristic)? anyways, I bet there's like a million little buffers all over the place in the graphics stack. It would be neat to go through all that and just see how slim you could get it, even if it broke a bunch of stuff.
senfiaj 7mo ago
Partly because we have more layers of abstraction. Just an extreme example, when you open a tiny < 1KB HTML file on any modern browser the tab memory consumption will still be on the order of tens, if not hundreds of megabytes. This is because the browser has to load / initialize all its huge runtime environment (JS / DOM / CSS, graphics, etc) even though that tiny HTML file might use a tiny fraction of the browser features. Partly because increased RAM usage can sometimes improve execution speed / smoothness or security (caching, browser tab isolation). Partly because developers have less pressure to optimize software performance, so they optimize other things, such as development time. Here is an article about bloat: https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-11-04/some-software-bloat-is-ok https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-11-04/some-software-bloat-...
tosti 7mo ago
2 Programmers sat at a table. One was a youngster and the other an older guy with a large beard. The old guy was asked: "You. Yeah you. Why the heck did you need 64K of RAM?". The old man replied, "To land on the moon!". Then the youngster was asked: "And you, why oh why did you need 4Gig?". The youngster replied: "To run MS-Word!"
Someone 7mo ago
> and I ran a 1600x1200 desktop with 24-bit color > What has changed? Why do I need 10x the RAM to open a handful of terminals and a text editor? It’s not a factor of ten, but a 4K monitor has about four times as many pixels. Cached font bitmaps scale with that, photos take more memory, etc. > When Windows 2000 came out In those times, when part of a window became uncovered, the OS would ask the application to redraw that part. Nowadays, the OS knows what’s there because it keeps the pixels around, so it can bitblit the pixels in. Again, not a factor of ten, but it contributes. The number of background processes likely also increased, and chances are you used to run fewer applications at the same time. Your handful of terminals may be a bit fuller now than it was back then. Neither of those really explain why you need gigabytes of RAM nowadays, though, but they didn’t explain why Windows 2000 needed whatever it needed at its time, either. The main real reason is “because we can afford to”.

winrid 7mo ago

Higher res icons probably add a couple hundred megs alone

Lerc 7mo ago
Well if you have a 512x512 icon uncompressed it is an even megabyte, so that makes the calculations fairly easy. But raw imagery is one of the few cases where you can legitimately require large amounts of RAM because of the squaring nature of area. You only need that raw state in a limited number of situations where you are manipulating the data though. If you are dealing with images without descending to pixels then there's pretty much no reason to keep it all floating around in that form, You generally don't have more than a hundred icons onscreen, and once you start fetching data from the slowest RAM in your machine you get pretty decent speed gains from using decompression than trying to move the uncompressed form around.
- winrid 7mo ago
  Aren't they usually all preloaded to prevent pop-in (or using some sort of heuristic)? anyways, I bet there's like a million little buffers all over the place in the graphics stack. It would be neat to go through all that and just see how slim you could get it, even if it broke a bunch of stuff.

senfiaj 7mo ago

Partly because we have more layers of abstraction. Just an extreme example, when you open a tiny < 1KB HTML file on any modern browser the tab memory consumption will still be on the order of tens, if not hundreds of megabytes. This is because the browser has to load / initialize all its huge runtime environment (JS / DOM / CSS, graphics, etc) even though that tiny HTML file might use a tiny fraction of the browser features. Partly because increased RAM usage can sometimes improve execution speed / smoothness or security (caching, browser tab isolation). Partly because developers have less pressure to optimize software performance, so they optimize other things, such as development time. Here is an article about bloat: https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-11-04/some-software-bloat-is-ok https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-11-04/some-software-bloat-...

tosti 7mo ago

2 Programmers sat at a table. One was a youngster and the other an older guy with a large beard. The old guy was asked: "You. Yeah you. Why the heck did you need 64K of RAM?". The old man replied, "To land on the moon!". Then the youngster was asked: "And you, why oh why did you need 4Gig?". The youngster replied: "To run MS-Word!"

Someone 7mo ago

> and I ran a 1600x1200 desktop with 24-bit color > What has changed? Why do I need 10x the RAM to open a handful of terminals and a text editor? It’s not a factor of ten, but a 4K monitor has about four times as many pixels. Cached font bitmaps scale with that, photos take more memory, etc. > When Windows 2000 came out In those times, when part of a window became uncovered, the OS would ask the application to redraw that part. Nowadays, the OS knows what’s there because it keeps the pixels around, so it can bitblit the pixels in. Again, not a factor of ten, but it contributes. The number of background processes likely also increased, and chances are you used to run fewer applications at the same time. Your handful of terminals may be a bit fuller now than it was back then. Neither of those really explain why you need gigabytes of RAM nowadays, though, but they didn’t explain why Windows 2000 needed whatever it needed at its time, either. The main real reason is “because we can afford to”.