kingcake wrote on 2024-03-01, 03:21:

32MB of RAM was a ton when Win 95 first launched. Most people did not have that much memory. 4-8MB was much more realistic at launch date. However Win 95 quickly pushed people to upgrade.

True. But it doesn't change the fact that Windows 95 or OS/2 had a need for such "
amounts of memory.

It was as with Windows Vista, essentially.
The official minimum requirements weren't honest, either.
The amount of memory that was needed for a "normal" use of Vista was above that.

Also, it's also a matter of priorities.
A programmer or database guy has different needs than a home user or gamer.

Most gamers in the DOS days didn't have the money for a memory expansion,
but simultaneously had lots of cash they could spend for big HDDs, a very fast 486 motherboard, double/quad speed CD-ROM drive or an expensive graphics card.

My father, for example, was the opposite.
He had a slow and dated PC and saved up the money for Windows and his applications.
It was a business PC, so to say.

Because of this, he could also get a tax refund for business related things.
You know, things like printer paper, printer ink and stuff. Or advertisement gifts.
Expenses required to run the business.

Edit: Tax refunds isn't exactly right term here, maybe. What I meant to say, the expenses were taken into account in the tax return.
English isn't my first language, sorry about that.

Edit: It was Win 95 RTM what ran on the 386DX-40 w/ 16 MB.
The upgrade version for Windows 3.x, I think.
It was the CD-ROM version, though.

Edit: It may also depend on the kind of applications being run.
Calculator, Paint and Notepad barely consume memory. They're more like utilities than applications, also.
OSes like GEM, Mac OS or that The Final Cartridge (C64) had them as part of their desktop application.

Full-fledged 32-Bit applications like MS Word, Visual C++ 4, Visual Basic 4 or Encarta may be different.
They may rather trigger Windows 95 into swapping.
Considering that small Windows 3.1x applications were still in wide use in the early days of Windows 95,
the high swap file usage wasn't as apparent to some users as it could be, maybe.

Edit: 4 MB is what I had in my 286-12 same time, to run Windows 3.1x in Standard-Mode.
It was a humble PC, too, with the exception for RAM expansion and the soundcard w/ SCSI CD-ROM drive.
VGA was plain VGA in 640x480 16c (mode 12h) most of time, because of the integrated ATI VGA Wonder from 1988 (256KB VGA RAM).

Edit: Back in the 90s, quite a number of systems ran below their real minimum requirements, I think.
The N64 console shipped with 4 MB of RAM, but Big N knew it wouldn't be enough from very start.
That's why the expansion pack was sold separately.

Jo22 wrote on 2024-03-01, 19:55:

True. But it doesn't change the fact that Windows 95 or OS/2 had a need for such " amounts of memory. […]
Show full quote

kingcake wrote on 2024-03-01, 03:21:

32MB of RAM was a ton when Win 95 first launched. Most people did not have that much memory. 4-8MB was much more realistic at launch date. However Win 95 quickly pushed people to upgrade.

True. But it doesn't change the fact that Windows 95 or OS/2 had a need for such "
amounts of memory.

It was as with Windows Vista, essentially.
The official minimum requirements weren't honest, either.
The amount of memory that was needed for a "normal" use of Vista was above that.

Also, it's also a matter of priorities.
A programmer or database guy has different needs than a home user or gamer.

Most gamers in the DOS days didn't have the money for a memory expansion,
but simultaneously had lots of cash they could spend for big HDDs, a very fast 486 motherboard, double/quad speed CD-ROM drive or an expensive graphics card.

My father, for example, was the opposite.
He had a slow and dated PC and saved up the money for Windows and his applications.
It was a business PC, so to say.

Because of this, he could also get a tax refund for business related things.
You know, things like printer paper, printer ink and stuff. Or advertisement gifts.
Expenses required to run the business.

Edit: Tax refunds isn't exactly right term here, maybe. What I meant to say, the expenses were taken into account in the tax return.
English isn't my first language, sorry about that.

Edit: It was Win 95 RTM what ran on the 386DX-40 w/ 16 MB.
The upgrade version for Windows 3.x, I think.
It was the CD-ROM version, though.

Edit: It may also depend on the kind of applications being run.
Calculator, Paint and Notepad barely consume memory. They're more like utilities than applications, also.
OSes like GEM, Mac OS or that The Final Cartridge (C64) had them as part of their desktop application.

Full-fledged 32-Bit applications like MS Word, Visual C++ 4, Visual Basic 4 or Encarta may be different.
They may rather trigger Windows 95 into swapping.
Considering that small Windows 3.1x applications were still in wide use in the early days of Windows 95,
the high swap file usage wasn't as apparent to some users as it could be, maybe.

Edit: 4 MB is what I had in my 286-12 same time, to run Windows 3.1x in Standard-Mode.
It was a humble PC, too, with the exception for RAM expansion and the soundcard w/ SCSI CD-ROM drive.
VGA was plain VGA in 640x480 16c (mode 12h) most of time, because of the integrated ATI VGA Wonder from 1988 (256KB VGA RAM).

Edit: Back in the 90s, quite a number of systems ran below their real minimum requirements, I think.
The N64 console shipped with 4 MB of RAM, but Big N knew it wouldn't be enough from very start.
That's why the expansion pack was sold separately.

Only about 4 games actually required the N64 expansion pack to run. (More than that supported it, but it wasn't required to play the game) Your historical narratives are extremely skewed and exaggerated.

the3dfxdude wrote on 2024-03-01, 13:25:

Not really. Except in the most earliest kernels, linux could not boot with only 2MB. I think they ended up hardcoding a check for 2MB minimum. The "hangs" and "crashes" wasn't because linux was unstable, but that was the sign you ran out of memory at boot, which is pretty easy at 4MB due to all the things they tried to cram in there. This is why the note you read said to start disabling things.

The reason 4MB was a problem is the distros were packing in selection of drive controller drivers directly into the kernel just so the user could boot and install the OS. Well it was unpredictable which kernels could boot in 4MB or not and no one really wanted to build more than a handful of kernels for everyone let alone test each with only 4MB. Eventually ramdisks took over the initial bootdisk selection problem, but at a cost of even more ram use. So if you were needing to do an initial boot with only a floppy and 4MB, you needed to select the bare.i which was just a boring standard IDE driver, with no other hardware features (no network) at install. Or you would have needed to compile your own kernel.

Zipslack sort of helped, because it was kind of a USB boot before USB. You could write a zip disk with a swap file built in and together with the bare 4MB kernel, you wouldn't run out of memory on the initial boot. But yeah customization was needed. I think based on numbers I collected that 4MB + 8MB swap could be enough to have a basic X11 desktop. But it would be slow. Probably no different than Win95, and harder to set up. I haven't run 4MB really anywhere since Win95 in '95. I think just having 8MB actual RAM is sooo much better already. So I think that's why really people just said to buy more RAM.

Good points, thanks! I forgot I always used to build custom kernels back then.

I think I first tried (very early - 1.0.x) Linux on my spare 4mb 386sx 40, but very quickly moved it on to an 8mb 486 dx2 around the 1.1/1.2 releases when I started using it more regularly (moving on to college and doing a Computer Science A-level).

Technically it worked, and you could have a working text based system, but yeah adding xfree86 and running startx (how quaint that seems now!) was an exercise of patience (and minutes of HDD grinding).

8mb was much more pleasant. Still, one of the first things I always did, after feeding the machine the stacks and stacks of floppy disks during install (including the kernel source disks) was to build a custom kernel (stripping out anything unnecessary and ensuring I had just ide disk and my mitsumi CDROM drivers).

kingcake wrote on 2024-03-01, 21:35:

Only about 4 games actually required the N64 expansion pack to run. (More than that supported it, but it wasn't required to play the game) Your historical narratives are extremely skewed and exaggerated.

Maybe, but I can't help it. 😁
That's how I experienced things back then.
I've been running (crawling) Windows 95 on 386/486 PCs with 4 MB back then when it was new.
Anyway, there were other examples that come to mind.

The Philips CD-i had a Megabyte of RAM, which seemed huge at the time but barely was enough for most games.

Same goes for Amiga platform.
The users had upgraded their systems in early 90s massively.
Or at least, upgrades were being heavily being advertised at the time.
Especially RAM, bridgeboards and accelerator cards.

On the other side, the Atari ST Mega wasn't being available as an 1MB model for a long time, even.
Rather, the 2 and 4MB models were being sold in late 80s.

Then, most games for the 8-Bit and 16-Bit consoles contained either extra RAM or some mapper chips to overcome memory limitations.

Or ISA VGA cards with the basic 256 KB of memory.
The memory was very little for anything beyond 640x480 16c.
So a memory upgrade in form of installung DIL/DIP chips in those emoty sockets was really required to make them usable for SVGA.

I mean, the popular 800x600 resolution in 16c worked. And 640x400 in 256c, too, but only a few applications supported this.
That's why PC Player Benchmark had a workaround, in case that VBE mode 100h wasn't being available.

IBM EGA boards were worse, though.
The basic 64KB of video RAM weren't enough to do Standard EGA in 640x350 in 16c.
They'd required a memory expansion of ~256KB, which wasn't cheap (what had been cheap, anyway?).
VGA cards had this as a standard configuration.

And I think the RAM on PCs was always too little, really.
Because they were being built with MS-DOS in mind, a single-tasking/single-user OS.

On DOS, applications either fit in memory or not.
Extra memory isn't being used much beyond HDD caches.

DOS4GW style extender games are an exception to this, maybe, because they use virtual memory.
They may use swap files, thus, if physical memory isn't being available.

OS/2, Windows NT and other complex systems always had a need for more than 4 MB of memory.
Same goes for things like DesqView /X, which is a combination of DesqView and an X11 display server for DOS.

There's a video about the Windows NT vs OS/2 showdown on YouTube.
It was recorded in early 90s, and the guy explicitly considers 8 MB of RAM, not 4 as mentioned on box and it makes sense.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJSKqY92XWA

In fact, these 4 MB had ruined the OS/2 experience here in my place at the time.
Which these Vobis/Escom PCs sadly were sold with, due reasons of price competition.

The result was that many users went back to Windows 3.1 because OS/2 was being feeling so sluggish.

All in all, that's also reason why DOOM wasn't being developed on a PC, but on a NeXT workstation, I suppose.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2016/09/01 … sh=6f667c8614d1

A standard DOS PC of the time wasn't very nice to develop on, unless being upgraded to a similarly capable system (there were early OSes like Xenix, PC-MOS/386 or Concurrent DOS).

Workstations, by contrast, weren't being x86 compatible but had memory expansions of up to 128MB (8 MB being standard).
They could do run multiple apple simultaneously, too.

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

So by contrast to a DOS PC, any Macintosh or a workstation running a *nix system was years ahead.

Emulator boards for Atari ST and Amiga were also available, since roughly late 80s.
They either contained a RAM expansion (sometimes with an RTC) or had required one.

Because a stock machine didn't have enough RAM to run both the host software and a PC with 640 to ~704KB of conventional memory.
If the machine had less, there was a tradeoff: The DOS emulation would have less memory.

The *nix systems also had several DOS emulators early on, I think.

Examples:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merge_(software)

Here's a screenshot of Merge running on UnixWare.
https://virtuallyfun.com/2020/12/06/unixware-1-0-on-86box/

In the video 'Steve Jobs Makes Fun of DOS in 1992' a DOS emulator is running, too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMX_FuOLoCI

That was good enough to run command line based utilities, like compilers, side by side with other applications.

From classics like Clipper Summer '87 over Turbo Pascal to Microsoft SDK (Microsoft Assembler MASM, the Microsoft C Compiler 6 etc).

Edit: There also was an Apple Unix for Macintoshs in early 90s.
But it had memory requirements that were being control too high for many users.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/UX

That's also why later releases of System had a higher memory requirement.
Components lile thevDirect Draw GX graphic system were complex and increased memory requirements.
Version 7.5.3 (1996) is being said to require 4 MB of RAM just to boot.

https://lowendmac.com/2014/system-7-5-and-mac … -end-of-an-era/

Jo22 wrote on 2024-03-02, 11:11:

Maybe, but I can't help it. 😁 That's how I experienced things back then. I've been running (crawling) Windows 95 on 386/486 PCs […]
Show full quote

kingcake wrote on 2024-03-01, 21:35:

Only about 4 games actually required the N64 expansion pack to run. (More than that supported it, but it wasn't required to play the game) Your historical narratives are extremely skewed and exaggerated.

Maybe, but I can't help it. 😁
That's how I experienced things back then.
I've been running (crawling) Windows 95 on 386/486 PCs with 4 MB back then when it was new.
Anyway, there were other examples that come to mind.

The Philips CD-i had a Megabyte of RAM, which seemed huge at the time but barely was enough for most games.

Same goes for Amiga platform.
The users had upgraded their systems in early 90s massively.
Or at least, upgrades were being heavily being advertised at the time.
Especially RAM, bridgeboards and accelerator cards.

On the other side, the Atari ST Mega wasn't being available as an 1MB model for a long time, even.
Rather, the 2 and 4MB models were being sold in late 80s.

Then, most games for the 8-Bit and 16-Bit consoles contained either extra RAM or some mapper chips to overcome memory limitations.

Or ISA VGA cards with the basic 256 KB of memory.
The memory was very little for anything beyond 640x480 16c.
So a memory upgrade in form of installung DIL/DIP chips in those emoty sockets was really required to make them usable for SVGA.

I mean, the popular 800x600 resolution in 16c worked. And 640x400 in 256c, too, but only a few applications supported this.
That's why PC Player Benchmark had a workaround, in case that VBE mode 100h wasn't being available.

IBM EGA boards were worse, though.
The basic 64KB of video RAM weren't enough to do Standard EGA in 640x350 in 16c.
They'd required a memory expansion of ~256KB, which wasn't cheap (what had been cheap, anyway?).
VGA cards had this as a standard configuration.

And I think the RAM on PCs was always too little, really.
Because they were being built with MS-DOS in mind, a single-tasking/single-user OS.

On DOS, applications either fit in memory or not.
Extra memory isn't being used much beyond HDD caches.

DOS4GW style extender games are an exception to this, maybe, because they use virtual memory.
They may use swap files, thus, if physical memory isn't being available.

OS/2, Windows NT and other complex systems always had a need for more than 4 MB of memory.
Same goes for things like DesqView /X, which is a combination of DesqView and an X11 display server for DOS.

There's a video about the Windows NT vs OS/2 showdown on YouTube.
It was recorded in early 90s, and the guy explicitly considers 8 MB of RAM, not 4 as mentioned on box and it makes sense.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJSKqY92XWA

In fact, these 4 MB had ruined the OS/2 experience here in my place at the time.
Which these Vobis/Escom PCs sadly were sold with, due reasons of price competition.

The result was that many users went back to Windows 3.1 because OS/2 was being feeling so sluggish.

All in all, that's also reason why DOOM wasn't being developed on a PC, but on a NeXT workstation, I suppose.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2016/09/01 … sh=6f667c8614d1

A standard DOS PC of the time wasn't very nice to develop on, unless being upgraded to a similarly capable system (there were early OSes like Xenix, PC-MOS/386 or Concurrent DOS).

Workstations, by contrast, weren't being x86 compatible but had memory expansions of up to 128MB (8 MB being standard).
They could do run multiple apple simultaneously, too.

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

So by contrast to a DOS PC, any Macintosh or a workstation running a *nix system was years ahead.

Emulator boards for Atari ST and Amiga were also available, since roughly late 80s.
They either contained a RAM expansion (sometimes with an RTC) or had required one.

Because a stock machine didn't have enough RAM to run both the host software and a PC with 640 to ~704KB of conventional memory.
If the machine had less, there was a tradeoff: The DOS emulation would have less memory.

The *nix systems also had several DOS emulators early on, I think.

Examples:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merge_(software)

Here's a screenshot of Merge running on UnixWare.
https://virtuallyfun.com/2020/12/06/unixware-1-0-on-86box/

In the video 'Steve Jobs Makes Fun of DOS in 1992' a DOS emulator is running, too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMX_FuOLoCI

That was good enough to run command line based utilities, like compilers, side by side with other applications.

From classics like Clipper Summer '87 over Turbo Pascal to Microsoft SDK (Microsoft Assembler MASM, the Microsoft C Compiler 6 etc).

You're on a forum full of nerds into historical computer hardware. You don't need to write a novel explaining this like you're talking to your mom. We all know this stuff.

.. but I like talking to people. 🥺

Edit: But really, RAM always had been a limiting factor kind of, I think.

Speaking od, that Amstrad Mega PC comes to mind right now, too.
It was released a year past Windows 3.1 and did ship with just a Megabyte of RAM (256KB for VGA).

That was about enough to still load DOS into HMA, if shadow memory also was being enabled.

It didn't meet the MPC requirements, either.
Both the system and video memory was too little.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_PC

kingcake wrote on 2024-03-02, 11:19:

You're on a forum full of nerds into historical computer hardware. You don't need to write a novel explaining this like you're talking to your mom. We all know this stuff.

Oh well, I appreciate some of your posts Jo22. Sometimes I might not need to be convinced of whatever point it is that you're trying to make - I sometimes already know/believe whatever it is and may have for 30 years or more - but some of the supporting evidence is new to me anyway so it can still be interesting. I didn't realise that regarding EGA cards for example. Other times I might not feel like reading certain posts written by you or others, but that's okay because I have a scroll bar, a mouse wheel, a page down key, a down arrow key, Ctrl-Tab, Ctrl-W, Alt-Tab, Alt-F4, etc. 😁

Thanks for your understanding! 😃

@kingcake I didn't mean to educate you or anybody else here. Really, I just find these things to be fascinating.
I mean, your point of view isn't wrong, either. Memory really was expensive back then, yes.
I just ment to say that software like Windows had, uhm, "enjoyed" the extra memory, if it was being available.

Edit: About 286 vs 4MB.. There's something I forgot to mention.
As a 286 user, you usually don't have virtual memory available (no swap file).
Not on Windows in Standard-Mode, at least. 🙁

OS/2 1.3 had implemented this ability for a 286, but also had higher RAM requirements on its own.
So you really needed to have enough physical memory in order to run certain applications, at all.

If I had 2 MB back in the 90s, I'm sure many Windows programs I used would have had caused an "out of memory" dialog.
Programs like Visual Basic, CompuServe Information Manager (WinCIM), SkyMap, T-Online or that Kodak Photo CD software..

The many shareware games I've played on Windows were quite large, too, at times.
About a megabyte, I assume. They also had used WAV files, often.

With just 2 MB, this would have been very close, I'm afraid.
By contrast, 3 MB would have been sufficed, though, I suppose.

That would have required 2x 1MB SIMM and 2x 512 KB SIMM
(286 and 386SX are 16-Bit wide and need thus pairs of 8-Bit SIMMs).

So yeah, two 1 MB SIMMs might have been more affordable than buying the four of them, perhaps.
If the motherboard had one megabyte and two unoccupied memory slots, still, I mean.

But even then, the memory management through segmentation wasn't easy.
The 286 processor/the 286 MMU had to work hard all time.

Thus, if memory was very fragmented on Windows, the games and applications would have been
likely running less smooth than with full memory expansion (4 MB, the upper limit of many 286 chipsets).

Edit: Formatting fixed (on PC).

I ran OS/2 Warp 4 back when it was new on an AMD 486DX4/120, then later on my Tyan S1563 system which you can see here. This is my (abbreviated) story:

Back in early 1995, when I first got into computers I was a DOS/Win3.1 user. It took awhile to learn it but it wasn't too difficult to grasp. I had a huge stack of books that I read to get started.

My next door neighbor was a rabid Warp 3 cultist who constantly badgered me to give it a try, but I ignored his BS because DOS and Win3.x worked pretty well for me. Warp 3 also cost money that I didn't have. Also, I was pretty much just into games and BBS shenanigans. I didn't need anything fancier. DOS and Telix were enough for me, at first.

When I started to get on the Internet, the Win3.1 software was just convoluted, buggy, and unstable. Trumpet Winsock was a nightmare to configure. When Win95 came out in mid-1995 I was one of the first in line to get a copy. The one I purchased was the floppy disk version. I remember the first one I bought had a couple of bad floppies, so I had to return it and get another. When I finally got it installed, I just hated it. Like, I REALLY HATED it. I was just too stuck on the DOS CLI and Win3.1 GUI to appreciate the new "start button" and menus. I remember thinking that "My Computer" was particularly insulting and dumbed-down. I ended up returning it and getting a refund, then went back to DOS and Win3.1.

Still, I wanted a more stable system that would give me better Internet access while retaining DOS and Win3.1 compatibility. When Warp 4 came out, I dropped something like ~$300 for it and bought a copy. Let me tell you something: Warp 4 was slick and way ahead of its time. It was like running Win2K, but 5 years earlier. It was fast, rock solid, and had ~95% DOS and Win3.1 compatibility. Life was really good with Warp 4, but there were some drawbacks.

1 - It seemed like I could never fully grasp the OS/2 system, no matter how many books I read or how much I studied. There always seemed to be a black magic component to really understanding OS/2. It just wasn't as straightforward as DOS or Win3.1. Something about it always eluded me.

2 - IBM charged for service packs, or "fixpacks" as they called them. I couldn't afford IBM's nickel-and-dime bullshit and was at the mercy of early internet pirates for updates. That was NOT cool, especially when the Win95 and WinNT dorks were getting updates for free from Microsoft.

3 - Lou Gerstner, CEO of IBM, was openly hostile towards OS/2 and its users. It was not a good sign for the system's longevity.

I actually ran Warp 4 until sometime in mid-1998 when I begrudgingly switched to Win95B OSR2. Diablo, Ultima Online, and 3dfx Voodoo were what prompted me to make the change. Win95B was not as good as Warp 4, but it had games and real support for my Orchid Righteous 3D. Ultimately that was enough to make the switch and I don't regret it. Support for Warp 4 began diminishing not long afterward and I never felt a need to return to it.

I feel that Win98SE was probably the final death knell for OS/2.

KT7AGuy wrote on 2024-03-04, 20:38:

IBM charged for service packs, or "fixpacks" as they called them.

When?
I'm pretty sure that in the era of Warp 3 and Warp 4 they were freely downloadable.

I think they had a brief spell of relative libertarianism round about 95 into 96, then clammed up and demanded beaucoup de clams again.

Hi. Just saw an interesting video that fits this topic, maybe.

High Tech: computers and gadgets in 1994
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwZadMzQIksd&t=220

"A computer that you buy today will likely be obsolete six months from now [..]"

I think that sums up the 90s pretty well. ;)