[dekhn]

I'm not sure if you're serious, but modern linux does a lot of things that solaris didn't do back then. A few more points: my linux system ran "OK" with 8MB RAM in 1995, although it started to swap when I ran emacs, X11, and g++ at the same time (this was ultimately fixed by maxxing out the RAM to 32MB).

I have small Linux systems today that work comfortable with 128MB of RAM used.

What my modern linux system does that Solaris didn't do in the 90s: runs a browser than can render absurdly detailed scenes using OpenGL where the object model itself exceeds 1GB (it fits nicely on the graphics card, but the computer is also loading that from the net at gigabit speeds and storing another copy in RAM).

That said, I think it's true that modern systems just waste oodles of resources unnecessarily.

[interlocutor]

The SGI Indy came with just 16 MB RAM, and ran the IRIX graphical environment and also had OpenGL. IRIX had excellent system administration tools.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGI_Indy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRIX

[dekhn]

We had Indys with 32MB of RAM in '97-98. They were basically useless- the OpenGL implementation wasn't that great, and the rest of the system was massively underprovisioned (constant slow disk IO). However, we also had a bunch of better SGIs with 64+MB of RAM and those worked great.

[pacaro]

Back when EMACS stood for Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping.

It's salutary to consider that the memory for a reasonably spec'd machine a little over 20 years ago is now a rounding error

I remember at about that time having 80MiB of RAM: a) my machine flew, and b) plenty of people would ask why I needed so much

[dekhn]

the "exotic" machine at the time was a Digital Alpha (64 bit! In 1995) that had 64MB IIRC. It did fly. The solaris machines we used took 20 minuts to boot and another 1 minute to open a shell.