[dekhn]

I ran TAMU Linux on a 486 with 4MB RAM in 1994. It wasn't much fun- you could start X windows, and emacs, but if you tried to compile with g++ at the same time it would page.

I spent $250 of my hard-earned money to buy an 8MB upgrade, and ultimately upgraded that machine to 32MB, at which point it "flew"- no paging during development.

[derefr]

That would be about the era when people who weren't so keen on hardware upgrades as a solution to their problem were denouncing Emacs for its memory usage, and encouraging people to "stick to" vi if they wanted a performant development system.

Imagine denouncing Emacs for its runtime size today, relative to the bloat that is VS Code or IntelliJ :)

[retrac]

Emacs? Eight megabytes and constantly swapping.

Even today editor bloat is real. On my netbook VSCode is noticeably laggy sometimes, and it wouldn't take too much more to start paging out the editor! It amazes me that we still can't do instantly responsive editors. Even my dinky notebook still has a gigabyte of RAM and can do a billion integer operations a second. But VSCode can't show text instantly. I guess I'll stick with vi!

[xvilka]

> Even today editor bloat is real.

Because it's not an editor - it's a browser. I wish some day all those Electron-based "applications" would go away forever. Worst of all technology "inventions".

[burlesona]

Just for what it’s worth, I’ve never had any lag, hanging, stuttering, etc. with Sublime Text 3. It’s very fast.

[simongr3dal]

It is fast and I find myself going between the two. But intellisense and the language plugins that Microsoft makes are just so much better than what Sublime Text offers.

[mixmastamyk]

Language servers often run anywhere, and generally aren't using up all the ram.

[asymptotically4]

For me (emacs + clangd), the language server slowly grows in memory usage until it's eaten up 32G and then gets OOM killed :(

[IgorPartola]

It’s ironic that I still get lag with my vim setup running on the latest MacBook Pro today but ran a 486 and was able to write code back then with about the same or better responsiveness. Biggest issue seems syntax checking and code folding on files over 3000 lines long. Yes I know long files aren’t ideal but also for the specific project I’m currently working on it’s somewhat better than a thousand 3 line files.

[ploxiln]

In my experience, it's just some particular syntaxes that vim is slow to process - large XML/HTML files in particular. But just ":synax off" when you want responsiveness more than you want colors :)

[IgorPartola]

For me it’s Python code. Django views and models. Which honestly should be pretty fast because it’s all indent based but I’ve tried a number of things and while I would up with acceptable results they still aren’t lag free.

[anthk]

There were lightweight Emacs clones, to be honest. And joe/jed.

[dekhn]

I had already bought into the emacs ecosystem- it ran fine on the micros that I had been using previously.

For most work programming I still use emacs 20+ years later but that's because of muscle memory. For hobby projects I use VS Code. It runs just fine on my 32-core, 64GB RAM desktop :)

[indymike]

I never had any problems with emacs on my low end 90Mhz Pentium with 8MB of RAM, as long as I stuck to -nox.

[dekhn]

yes, I should have mentioned: I was using the X windows version of emacs (at the time, I thought that was a Really Cool Thing- now, I use text emacs in tmux). I think it has a much larger footprint.

[flatiron]

I used a 486 66dx2 until 2001 when I went to college. FreeBSD was by far and away the winner on that thing. Had 20 megs of RAM and a 2.2 gig hard drive. Ran X and WordPerfect and Netscape in Linux compatibility better than natively in Slackware. Got me through high school with no problems (had to buy an external modem as the one it came with was a winmodem) No clue the current state of things though.

[anthk]

You could browse the web perfectly back in the day, and Nethack ran like a charm, too :).

[dleslie]

The web loaded and rendered faster because Javascript was used sparingly, if it was used at all. XMLHTTPRequest didn't become a thing until 1999 and didn't catch fire until later, and so async requests just didn't happen.

For a short window of time we were using 1px flash objects to act as an async intermediary...

Yeah, I miss the static web.

[anthk]

Yeah, I know. I still use Dillo because almost everything is usable. at least fora, news sites and such.

Except this site, which I find atrocious having to use JS in order to search. I use DDG/Google on just the domain (site:news.ycombinator.com) and call it done.

But well, no mpg123's unless being played at a reduced band (11MHZ, mono). If converted to mp2, the files would be bigger, but playable at highest quality.

[dleslie]

How do you feel about NetSurf? I still prefer Dillo, but NetSurf looks promising.

[anthk]

Too crashy (I use v4.0), and slower on rendering than Dillo, by far.

Also, I can't set the User Agent to anything else, in order to fix rendering errors. For example, the PSP one, still supported on tons of sites. Or the first Opera Mini releases, pre v5.

[flatiron]

I wasn’t a huge net hack fan but I had half a dozen mud accounts on all the local BBSs. I was quite the ladies man. Eagle Scout band dork BBS MUD man.

[anthk]

They are still alive, altough I prefer roguelikes on local now; and, for something close, IF and a Zmachine interpreter. Netplay? Just quick matches with my SO on an emulator for 90's machines, or an adventure being played together, solving puzzles.

[flatiron]

What roguelikes do you recommend?

[anthk]

Slashem, DCSS, OmegaRPG...

[gorgoiler]

I had a 4MB machine and an extra 1MB stick. I didn’t know how to install it so I taped it the case out of spite against technology. Plus ca change...