[forinti]

For the applications that were really important then (spreadsheets and word processing) even 64KB would be reasonable for most people. With 640KB you could run a medium-sized business.

[bombcar]

I loved the HP200LX just for that reason - it was a hand-held 90s palmtop that was a full-fledged 186, with DOS 5.0 and "multitasking" and about a meg of RAM - and it could run ANY of those 80s programs, including a full Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet.

That power - phenomenal, especially in the early Internet age.

[mikepurvis]

Wasn't power management an issue with early portable computers? I feel like it wasn't until Windows 95 and beyond that machines were properly sleeping in between tasks— before then you were likely to end up just spinning the processor in an idle task.

This kind of thing can even be a problem trying to virtualize DOS stuff: https://www.os2museum.com/wp/idle-dr-dos/

[bombcar]

That was the other thing - it would run for ages on 2 AA batteries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_200LX

30-40 hours but it worked out to basically "it was always good to go".