Maybe I'm missing the joke, but Emacs was famous for bringing multi-megabyte machines to their knees and garbage collecting for minutes. The joke was that emacs stood for "eight megabytes and constantly swapping".
According to the GNU Emacs docs, it can also stand for "Emacs Makes A Computer Slow", "Eventually Mallocs All Computer Storage", or (my favorite) "Escape Meta Alt Control Shift".
The joke was popular among the more elitist vi users, sure, but Emacs was a widely used and useful piece of software 20 years ago on processors a dozen times slower than today's. That's a success story in my books.
Yes, Emacs was bigger and sometimes slower than typical editors of the day, but no, I never saw anything like "garbage collecting for minutes". (I used it on a 486 with 8M; I think I also used it some on a 386 with 4M in console mode, but the old memory's getting fuzzy.)