My first PC was a 286-16 which came with 1MB of RAM. Later on when Windows 3.0 (or was it 3.1?) came along I upgraded to 4MB.

Years later, I remember going all out on a Pentium II-266 system--I had that thing configured with a whopping 192MB of EDO!

The custom-built 486 DX4-100 my brother gave us in the summer of 1995 had 16MB.

IIRC the PCs my high school's computer lab had in freshman year (1997) were an assorted mix of quite obsolete 486es, mostly DX-33 and DX2-66 typically equipped with 8MB (Small-town rural school district, they typically only upgraded once a decade). There were a few early 486 AutoCAD systems in the school shop I can recall running with 4MB.

For a brief while in the late 90s my mom had a secondhand Gateway 4DX2-66V desktop that she received with 12MB, but whether this is originally what it came with from the factory or not I cannot say.

A bargain-basement MediaGX 180 desktop my brother got in 1997 came with 16MB, as did the equally bargain-basement PMMX 200 laptop I got in 1998. I'd say by this time though 32MB was the more common standard.

my first pc was a pentium 75 (bought 1994) and it had 8 MB ram.... soon it was upgraded to 16 mb.

Windows 98 (so around 1998) had 64 mb.

My 25Mhz 386 was 2MB, then 4MB (INSANELY EXPENSIVE AT THE TIME...$$$$$). I then upgraded to a 40MHz 386 with 4MB of RAM. After that was a 486DX2-66 w/8MB of ram. Pentium 90Mhz with 16MB or 32MB . Then a 233MHz MMX with 64MB. After that it gets fuzzy...

shamino wrote:

My family got a low end 386SX-16MHz PC in ~1991 or early 92. It had 8 30pin sockets supporting 256KB or 1MB each, so the maximu […]
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My family got a low end 386SX-16MHz PC in ~1991 or early 92. It had 8 30pin sockets supporting 256KB or 1MB each, so the maximum was 8MB.
It came with 2MB consisting of two 1MB 30pin 70ns SIMMs. The manual said it only needed 80ns, but even at the time it was built they were already putting faster memory in it than it required. If there was any BIOS option or jumper to use the faster speed then I never saw it. I think it just used them at 80ns.

We doubled the RAM to 4MB sometime in 92 using another pair of 1MB 70ns SIMMs. This was when the local shop had put up a banner advertising $50 per megabyte. Those SIMMs were 70ns as well, they didn't even have 80ns so that must have been obsolete.

With 4MB, I was amazed how the machine could run multiple DOS games under DOS Shell or Windows 3.0. It could ALT-TAB between them and live to tell about it. It wasn't useful, but I thought it was cool.
I tried to make Ultima 7 run better by increasing the size of the SMARTDRV cache, but I don't think it did much. I can't think of any game I played back then that had any use for more than 2MB. U7 required nearly 2MB, and I think everything else was 1MB or less.
So in retrospect I'm not sure if the memory upgrade did much for that computer. I think Windows 3.0/1 did run better, but I'm not sure it mattered. I can't remember Windows being used for anything except a word processor or playing with Paint in 16 colors. Maybe I'm forgetting something.
I know the difference from 2MB to 4MB seemed amazing when it was pushed, but I'm having trouble thinking of a practical benefit it served. What that machine desperately needed was a faster CPU, but it was soldered.

Back in those days I thought multitasking was a cool concept but I don't think it was actually important, because it's just not how people used that computer. People just ran one thing at a time. We didn't have email clients and winamp and web browsers and all that noise, just whatever single thing we were doing and that was it.

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Our 486 was a debacle from beginning to end. It was assembled in 1994 with the 4MB inherited from the 386, and that was fine at first. It finally reached 8MB in 1995. I remember 8MB being minimal to play "NBA 95".
We put Win95 on that computer within a few days of release. It either stayed at 8MB or didn't get much further than that. This was when Windows started to get used a lot more and multitasking was becoming relevant. We were on AOL and didn't go online much more than 10hrs a month, or whatever the limit was.

Our Cyrix 6x86-133 was bought in I think 1996 with 16MB. It was a pair of 8MB EDO SIMMs purchased at the same time as the motherboard. It was a pretty common amount of RAM at that point. This was probably the first machine I ran WinAmp on and used the internet in a big way. Each multitasked application was a big hit on RAM. I'm sure it had upgrades but I don't remember them.
Around maybe 1997, the old 486 got rebuilt as a 2nd PC and was given a 32MB SIMM so it could run Netscape. That was well after obsolescence though.

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All through this time RAM always felt like a limited resource. The first time I ever felt I had a luxury of cheap RAM was when I upgraded my K6-3 to 320MB, which was I think in 2000 or so. It seemed nuts to have so much RAM, it was hardly being used. I think that was a turning point for me with running more background applications and not worrying much about it anymore. RAM in the 386/486/Pentium years was too expensive to have in excess.

Your 386 experience is similar to mine as when I upgraded to 4MB I also had the feeling that probably no games would benefit from it. What it did benefit was surely W3.1, I remember faster opening and less stressing usage.
I remember that in those days the usual ram counter at boot was the classical "benchmark" as ram was the only thing that matter 🤣.

386SX wrote:

Your 386 experience is similar to mine as when I upgraded to 4MB I also had the feeling that probably no games would benefit from it. What it did benefit was surely W3.1, I remember faster opening and less stressing usage.
I remember that in those days the usual ram counter at boot was the classical "benchmark" as ram was the only thing that matter 🤣.

I think everyone who lived through those days remember doubling their memory, or quadrupling it and the experience of hitting the "ESC" key for the first time. The RAM counter sound take that much longer when booting up was oddly...very oddly...satisfying. That very long "BzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzT" and the few seconds of showing you all of that delicious RAM. 😎

Darkman wrote:

looking back 32MB seems small , though of course in 10 or 15 years time Im sure I will look back on today and wonder just how I got by with a "tiny" 8GB on my current system

Nowdays excessive run for the higher configurations seems to be more a way to compensate lower and lower sw optimization.

386SX wrote:

Nowdays excessive run for the higher configurations seems to be more a way to compensate lower and lower sw optimization.

I'm fairly sure people have been saying that forever. 😉

As far as my personal systems "back in the day":

286-16: 1024k
486sx: 4MB
486dx2-66 (my college dream machine, later upgraded to 5x86-133): 12MB or 16MB (hard to remember, but it was at least 12 although I started out with 4 and went to 12 once switching to OS/2 and doing 3d work).
P-120: 16MB RAM

As far as what was normal, I think 286 systems commonly had 1MB, 386 and low-end 486 had 2-4mb, high-end 486 had 8mb and up, and Pentium had 8-16mb commonly (8mb was if you were on a budget).

shamino wrote:

So in retrospect I'm not sure if the memory upgrade did much for that computer. I think Windows 3.0/1 did run better, but I'm not sure it mattered. I can't remember Windows being used for anything except a word processor or playing with Paint in 16 colors. Maybe I'm forgetting something.
I know the difference from 2MB to 4MB seemed amazing when it was pushed, but I'm having trouble thinking of a practical benefit it served. What that machine desperately needed was a faster CPU, but it was soldered.

The main advantage of for example 8 or 16 MB RAM versus 4 MB was that Windows did not need to write to the swapfile on harddisk so often. It made a noticable difference, I seem to remember, in for example Photoshop.

I remember the RAM jumping in price in the 90s to the magnitude of over a hundred dollars per megabyte. At the time I was told that it was due to price fixing caused by hoarding by the Korean or Taiwanese manufacturers.

For what it is worth...
http://www.jcmit.com/memoryprice.htm

swaaye wrote:

386SX wrote:

Nowdays excessive run for the higher configurations seems to be more a way to compensate lower and lower sw optimization.

I'm fairly sure people have been saying that forever. 😉

Yeah. I doubt really if productivity did improve as much as the big progress of computing power and what changed for the usual final consumer or office worker.

80286- typically 1mb (sometimes 2, 3 or 4mb added later as an upgrade)
80386- typically 1 or 2MB (upgraded to 4,5 of 8 later)
80486- typically 4MB (upgraded to 8, 16 or 20mb later)
Pentium - typically 8 or 16mb (upgraded to 24, 32 or 40mb later)

386SX wrote:

swaaye wrote:

386SX wrote:

Nowdays excessive run for the higher configurations seems to be more a way to compensate lower and lower sw optimization.

I'm fairly sure people have been saying that forever. 😉

Yeah. I doubt really if productivity did improve as much as the big progress of computing power and what changed for the usual final consumer or office worker.

I believe the main benefits of our higher processing power/memory show in gaming, multimedia and physics simulation. When it comes to productivity, though, the need for processing power for a given job has also increased, reducing the perceived benefits somewhat. Eg. a guy working on a P3/P4 making vídeos was not expected to put out content at the same resolution people are expected today, games are also expected to look better (more polygons/lightning effects/textures), and simulations now are much more detailed. Your average dude running a word processor won't feel a difference, though... except perhaps in Excel with huge files that need to be recalculated.

I remember the first computer I bought myself was a Pentium 90 with 8MB. This was summer -95. -97 i got a P166 that had 16MB and I took the 8MB from the P90 so I had 24MB. After that I had many different systems and upgraded alot so it's kind of fussy. But I had a K6-2 450 with 96MB I think, after the P166, this was in -00. The ram amount was quite odd back then since there was no dual channel and you took what you could find 😀

alexanrs wrote:

386SX wrote:

Nowdays excessive run for the higher configurations seems to be more a way to compensate lower and lower sw optimization.

I believe the main benefits of our higher processing power/memory show in gaming, multimedia and physics simulation. When it comes to productivity, though, the need for processing power for a given job has also increased, reducing the perceived benefits somewhat. Eg. a guy working on a P3/P4 making vídeos was not expected to put out content at the same resolution people are expected today, games are also expected to look better (more polygons/lightning effects/textures), and simulations now are much more detailed. Your average dude running a word processor won't feel a difference, though... except perhaps in Excel with huge files that need to be recalculated.

Interesting point. Obviously a modern word processor "can eventually" do much (?) more than in the past, but even if you'd use it to just write a letter and print it, you'd eventually need the whole processing power;let's just compare hdd space required and cpu usage.
I am sure that if I use a modern system even with their immense processing power so big to require 1000W of power supply, everything will just feel slower or let's say less smooth than any 90's alternatives.

Marquzz wrote:

I remember the first computer I bought myself was a Pentium 90 with 8MB. This was summer -95. -97 i got a P166 that had 16MB and I took the 8MB from the P90 so I had 24MB. After that I had many different systems and upgraded alot so it's kind of fussy. But I had a K6-2 450 with 96MB I think, after the P166, this was in -00. The ram amount was quite odd back then since there was no dual channel and you took what you could find 😀

Probably in the W98 world ram benefit would certainly be felt after upgrading but I also had some delusions about it. I remember the K62-350 from 64MB to 128MB... or also the same 386SX from 1MB to 4MB...

386SX wrote:

Probably in the W98 world ram benefit would certainly be felt after upgrading but I also had some delusions about it. I remember the K62-350 from 64MB to 128MB... or also the same 386SX from 1MB to 4MB...

In my experience, Windows 95 runs fine with 8-16 MB, Windows 98SE runs fine with 16+ MB.
Windows NT4 is fine with 32-64 MB.
Then there's a huge leap forward. Win2000/XP want 256-512 MB to work acceptably. I tried running Win2000 on my P133 with 64 MB once... BAD idea 😀
And with Vista you probably don't want less than 2 GB. But then it sorta stabilized. Win7 is doable with 2-3 GB, and Win8/10 actually are more efficient with memory than Win7, because of the tablet-optimizations. They work better with 2 GB than Win7 did.

PARKE wrote:

For what it is worth...
http://www.jcmit.com/memoryprice.htm

Hmm, the prizes in 2012 seems a bit off. They were really low and I bought 16 GB to my laptop for under 45 USD (450 SEK incl 25% VAT)