[cmrdporcupine]

Yeah the thing is, while these things were "lightweight" in comparison to today, they were not lightweight relative to the machines of the time. I had an 8MB 486 running early Linux versions and it was always a struggle. You could, with some swapping, run emacs, mosaic, X, etc. all at once, but it was slow.

As now, same back then .. software developers tended to max out the capabilities of their machines. Which we were often on the whole beefier than what the general community had.

If you actually go back and use software from the 90s on 90s machines, it's amazing how slow the experience can be. Input latencies are often better, but .. throughput awful. Start up times, etc just bleak. A lot of pauses for loading... which we just accepted along with the sound of a grinding hard drive or floppy disk.

[anthk]

Running X with 8MB of RAM? Emacs perfectly ran on TTY's, and for web browser Lynx worked. Images? You would get a SVGAlib viewer.

With 16MB of RAM, and FVWM and RXvt (xvt before) ran circles around a Sparc with CDE and DTTerm/Xterm.

[cmrdporcupine]

Yeah mostly I did what you said (terminal emacs, lynx/gopher). There did come an era (late 94, 95) before I could afford to upgrade to e.g. Pentium or higher class machine but after which it was important to be able to run e.g. Netscape to Do Things For the Real World.

[hulitu]

> throughput awful. Start up times, etc just bleak. A lot of pauses for loading.

Wellcome to Windows 11 /s