About memory expansion, I think it really depends on use case.
I think I've way too often told already that my father had a 386DX-40 PC with 16MB of RAM or that I had a 286-12 PC with 4MB of RAM.
Way back in early-mid 90s. But it wasn't for luxury whatsoever.
The programs (Windows programs) we had were memory hungery, simply.
It was even worse on the 286, because Standard-Mode didn't offer any virtual memory.
Try running something like Visual Basic (it simply was popular back then, among all users. Free working models did exist), T-Online or CompuServe Information Manager with 2MB and find out how far you can get.
On Windows 95, which my father had used, the situation was even more deceptive.
Windows 95 seemed to run on 16 MB just fine after a clean boot.
Opening Calculator or Notepad didn't cause any noticeable change, either.
But the more often you open/closed applications the HDD activity got more and more noticeable.
After launching full-fledged applications like Netscape, Visual Basic or Delphi+Interbase the two internal IDE HDDs sounded like a grinder.
Windows 95 apparently had a hard time swapping.
So in retrospect, I wouldn't use Windows 95 with anything less than 32 MB anymore.
It's memory management is somewhat broken. Windows 98/SE is much better here.
But again, it really depends on use case.
Playing SkiFree or Minesweeper on 95 doesn't need more than 8 MB of RAM.
Programming for fun is another matter, though.
Please let me quote myself from an earlier thread :
Jo22 wrote:For programmers (aka software/hardware developers), which wrote the software that people at home used, it was a bit different, o […]
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For programmers (aka software/hardware developers), which wrote the software that people at home used, it was a bit different, of course.
From what I learned from my father's Windows C programming books (1990-1993), the specs were like this (please fasten your seat belts):
Minimum: AT 80386 with 25 MHz, 2 or 4 MB main memory, 80 MB HDD (< 28ms access time), VGA graphics
"Optimum": AT/EISA 80386 with 33 MHz, 4 MB main memory, 120 MB HDD (< 18ms access time), Super VGA graphics
High-end (high comfort): AT/EISA 80486 with 33 or 50 MHz, 8MB of main memory or more, 200 MB SCSI or ESDI HDD (< 18ms access time), Super VGA graphics
In the book, the compilation time of the sample project was being said to be 6 (!) minutes.
The HDDs were the most limiting factor, it seems. Having a RAM drive or a large HDD cache (in HDD or in software) would have made a change.
Edit: The book was written in the Windows 3.x days, of course. Windows 95 on its own has higher requirements, of course.
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