Sometimes it's discouraging to think about how RAM requirements keep going up. The laptop I bought in 1999 had 64 MB of RAM, and that was enough for a comfortable multitasking system (dual-booting between Windows 9x and Linux with a GUI) for about two years.
Now, we have this, paraphrased from the 2012 novel _Off to Be the Wizard_ by Scott Meyer. Phillip, a time traveler from 1984, asks, "What on earth can a person do with 4 gigabytes of RAM?" Martin, from 2012, answers, "Upgrade it immediately."
Of course, things do get better over time, and some of those improvements require more RAM. Still, I wonder how much of the increases in minimum RAM requirements are actual progress, and how much are just waste. Is there even a way to answer that question? If I were to set up a machine (even a VM) running Windows 98 and Red Hat Linux 6.0 today, it probably couldn't do much on the current Internet, so I wouldn't be able to fairly evaluate how much the operating systems have actually improved.
Now, we have this, paraphrased from the 2012 novel _Off to Be the Wizard_ by Scott Meyer. Phillip, a time traveler from 1984, asks, "What on earth can a person do with 4 gigabytes of RAM?" Martin, from 2012, answers, "Upgrade it immediately."
Of course, things do get better over time, and some of those improvements require more RAM. Still, I wonder how much of the increases in minimum RAM requirements are actual progress, and how much are just waste. Is there even a way to answer that question? If I were to set up a machine (even a VM) running Windows 98 and Red Hat Linux 6.0 today, it probably couldn't do much on the current Internet, so I wouldn't be able to fairly evaluate how much the operating systems have actually improved.