alt Hacker NewsNot to disrespect this, but it used to be entirely normal to have a GUI environment on a machine with 2MB of RAM and a 40MB disk.
Or 128K of ram and 400 kb disk for that matter.
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The Acorn Archimedes had the whole OS on a 512KB ROM.
That said, OSs came with a lot less stuff then.
When I first started using QNX back in 1987/88 it was distributed on a couple of 1.4MB floppy diskettes! And you could install a graphical desktop that was a 40KB distribution!
I would like to have this again
I prefer to use additional RAM and disk for data not code
With 320x240 pixels and 256 colors
"640k ought to be enough for everyone!"
> Or 128K of ram and 400 kb disk for that matter.
Or 32K of RAM and 64KB disk for that matter.
What's your point? That the industry and what's commonly available gets bigger?
A single 1920x1080 framebuffer (which is a low resolution monitor in 2025 IMO) is 2MB. Add any compositing into the mix for multi window displays and it literally doesn’t fit in memory.