Comment by vel0city
5 days ago
> We used to have 64MB and that was plenty.
Bullshit. It was cramped and I wasn't able to do half of what I was wanting to actually do. Maybe it was plenty for your usecases, but such a small amount of memory was weak for my needs in the late 90s and 2000s. 64MB desktops struggled to handle the photo manipulations I wanted to do with scanned images. Trying to do something like edit video on a home PC was near impossible with that limited amount of memory. I was so happy when we managed to get a 512MB machine a few years later, it made a lot of my home multimedia work a lot better.
There are some use cases that simply require a lot of memory because they do, but I'm talking in general. Software that doesn't have a good excuse, used to run in 64MB how it now runs in 64GB.
Besides, you just said you only needed 512MB, which is still nothing these days.
> Besides, you just said you only needed 512MB, which is still nothing these days.
I didn't say I "only needed 512MB", only that things were a lot better once we got a 512MB machine. Things continued to get massively better as I upgraded to a 1GB machine, an 8GB machine, etc.
> I'm talking in general
Isn't doing some light picture editing/organizing, playing back multimedia, etc. pretty dang general computer use these days? Or what, is "general" computer usage entirely limited to 80 column text manipulation? You'd have a hard time even just keeping my displays drawn with 64MB of memory at the resolutions and bit depths and multiple desktops that are common.
I play around with retro computers (especially the early/mid 90s for that nostalgia) and I'm constantly reminded of how little memory we really had to play with back then, and these are on pretty much fully loaded home desktop machines. Have a Word document open and you're trying to play back an MP3 and have a couple browser windows open? Oof, good luck! You want to stream a video? I hope its about 10FPS at 320x240! Opening one photo from my camera today and you'll have used half the memory before its even hit the framebuffer.