[jeroenhd]

I think a better conclusion is how much more resource intensive entire interactive GUI operating systems have become since. Cryptography inherently relies on algorithms that are as secure as possible given currently reasonable hardware requirements. More security means bigger keys, more cycles, more work.

Windows 95 could boot on 4 megabytes of RAM. It could work comfortably on 16 megabytes of RAM! Visual Studio 5, an entire systems IDE, ran comfortably with 32MB of RAM and a Pentium chip! Even if you ignore the extended screen buffer, you'll be hard pressed to find even a basic text editor that will run that lean. What's notepad.exe even doing with all that memory?

You don't need all that much for a GUI if you optimise well. Today's GUIs are built to be quick to develop, not easy to run, because everything needs to be done quickly and only optimised later if people complain about it. Real sad, in my opinion.

Sometimes I wonder what my system is doing with the 2 to 3 gigabytes of RAM and five percent of a quad core CPU running a several gigahertz clock; it's using right after boot; it's certainly not running 500 times the complexity of Windows 95!