The original Pentium was released @1993-1994, so the ram amounts would be around the same as mid-late 486.

My Siemens 386 (BIOS date 1992, el cheapo then) came with 4MB RAM.
My uncle's Pentium MMX 166 (bought in 1997) came with 32MB RAM (2x16MB EDO simms).

Ram was not cheap back then.

I got 286-16 in 1992 with 1MB ram. My friends father had 486dx-33 with 16MB ram. I didn't even know what to do with that amount 😁

For Win 3.1X 8MB was usually enough. Standard was 4MB with 386DX-33/40. Even 486 usually didn't have more then 8MB. Later with Windows 95 release the normal became 16MB and 32MB with Windows 98. My brother was using Linux in 1994 on 386DX-40 with 8MB ram and later in the year upgraded to AMD 486DX4-100 with 16MB and Diamond Stealth64 PCI card - for compatibility reasons - X11 support.

Used a Windows NT 4.0 workstation with 32MB in 1996/97 that hosted a small web server. Memory was always on the expensive side so you never had too much of it - like now-a-days 😉

In my case:
386SX-16 bought around 1990 with 1 MB of RAM, expanded somewhat later to 5 MB.
486DX2-66 bought around 1994 with 4 MB of RAM, expanded to 8 MB later (currently 16 MB, but that doesn't really count, it's a single 72-pin module that didn't even exist back then).
Pentium 133 bought around 1996 with 8 MB, expanded to 48, then 64 MB later.

Yeah I do remember it was really expensive even the 30 pin simms when 72 pins were already released.I remember that when I saw the counter on the 386 that had 16MB of ram running at boot, it was unbeleivable to me...

Scali wrote:

In my case: 386SX-16 bought around 1990 with 1 MB of RAM, expanded somewhat later to 5 MB. 486DX2-66 bought around 1994 with 4 M […]
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In my case:
386SX-16 bought around 1990 with 1 MB of RAM, expanded somewhat later to 5 MB.
486DX2-66 bought around 1994 with 4 MB of RAM, expanded to 8 MB later (currently 16 MB, but that doesn't really count, it's a single 72-pin module that didn't even exist back then).
Pentium 133 bought around 1996 with 8 MB, expanded to 48, then 64 MB later.

Well that's it, a Pentium 133 with 8MB sound so weird compared to a 486-DX2 with the same amount...

386SX wrote:

Yeah I do remember it was really expensive even the 30 pin simms when 72 pins were already released.I remember that when I saw the counter on the 386 that had 16MB of ram running at boot, it was unbeleivable to me...

Must have been a high-end board.
My 386SX-16 simply didn't fit more than 5 MB: 1 MB was as regular chips on the motherboard, and it had 4 30-pin slots, which could hold 256K or 1M modules.

I don't think my 486 can even handle more than 16 MB. It has 4x 30-pin modules, and 2x 72-pin, where one of the 72-pin ones can only be used if you didn't use the 30-pin ones. And you could use either 2x8 MB or 1x16 MB max.

I've seen some interesting 486-boards, which had no less than 16 30-pin slots 😀

I have a 286 that supports 16MB of memory. Even some 386DX had 16 simm slots.

Scali wrote:

Must have been a high-end board. My 386SX-16 simply didn't fit more than 5 MB: 1 MB was as regular chips on the motherboard, and […]
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386SX wrote:

Yeah I do remember it was really expensive even the 30 pin simms when 72 pins were already released.I remember that when I saw the counter on the 386 that had 16MB of ram running at boot, it was unbeleivable to me...

Must have been a high-end board.
My 386SX-16 simply didn't fit more than 5 MB: 1 MB was as regular chips on the motherboard, and it had 4 30-pin slots, which could hold 256K or 1M modules.

I don't think my 486 can even handle more than 16 MB. It has 4x 30-pin modules, and 2x 72-pin, where one of the 72-pin ones can only be used if you didn't use the 30-pin ones. And you could use either 2x8 MB or 1x16 MB max.

I've seen some interesting 486-boards, which had no less than 16 30-pin slots 😀

Sure it was. I didn't ever see that 386 mainboard but I am sure about the counter, when I was running on 1024KB... 😁
On the friend's 486 I am sure that it couldn't go over 20MB (4 + 2x8) as bios limitation. But at those time I didn't know why its pc was so faster than mine. 486 33Mhz plus VLB on board video... mine 386SX with OAK 256kb... come on.... 😁

In september 1993 I bought a Diamond VLB board that supported from 4 to 32 MB 72 pin SIMM in each of the four sockets - total thus 128 MB.
https://th99.bl4ckb0x.de/m/C-D/31591.htm
When I bought it it was offered with 4 MB which was probably enough for all 'normal' use 😀. The going price for system RAM was around $60 per 1 MB in Europe at the time.

A friend of mine had 24MB of SIMM memory for his Pentium MMX 166MHz iirc (2x4MB FPM and 2x8MB EDO, the 4MB modules were from when they upgraded from a Pentium 90)
My first PC was a Pentium II 350MHz and it had a massive 128MB (though at the time I remember them being sold with 32MB and 64MB).

Tetrium wrote:

A friend of mine had 24MB of SIMM memory for his Pentium MMX 166MHz iirc (2x4MB FPM and 2x8MB EDO, the 4MB modules were from when they upgraded from a Pentium 90)
My first PC was a Pentium II 350MHz and it had a massive 128MB (though at the time I remember them being sold with 32MB and 64MB).

Yeah I remember my K62-350 just released as medium budject configuration came with 64MB PC100 where friends had usually 32MB PC100 or also PC66. Windows 98 ran quiet well at the beginning.

According to Wikipedia, minimum system requirements for Windows NT 3.1 were a 25 MHz 80386 processor and at least 12 megabytes of memory. That was a heck of a lot of memory for 1993.

well for the first PC I actually owned in 1997 , it had 32MB of RAM , and that was for a Pentium Pro system my dad built for my birthday. I remember thinking it was quite alot given previous machines Ive used had 8 or 16 , so 32MB seemed very substantial. in 1999 it was upgraded to 64MB. in an effort to try and keep the thing competitive to some level. The system started with Win95 and ended up with WIn98SE by the end of its life.

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

The 386 SX-25 we got in 1991 had 4MB RAM (later upgraded to 8 ). Pentium 166 in late '96 had 32MB.

386SX wrote:

my memory sometimes falls thinking at the amount of ram we had back in those days

Look at late games wich had these CPU in recommended hardware section.
I suppose typical max:
386 - 4 Mb
486 - 8 Mb
Pentium - 32 Mb

So, when Pentium 1 was released which amount of ram was considered big or extreme?

When in 1993 Pentium was released, 386 were still popular, so > 4 Mb was considered big. >8 Mb very big

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.

My IBM 55SX 386SX-16 had 4MB in the early 90s, the 486 SX33 that replaced it had 8MB. The late 1994 AMD DX2-80 system also had 8MB at the start, I do not remember if I ever got more before I upgraded to a Pentium.

All my Pentium and Pentium 2 systems had insane amounts of memory for the time so they are not good benchmarks 😀

When my uncle got his Packard Bell 486 in 1991 it came with 4MB of RAM, and was eventually upgraded to 20MB (it had four 30 pin sockets and could take 1MB, 2MB and 4MB SIMMs).

My first PC in late 1994 was a Pentium 100 with 8MB of RAM (two 4MB 72 pin SIMMs). I really wanted 16MB (don't ask why 😅 ) but couldn't afford it; just getting the CPU, Socket 5 motherboard and memory was enough to make my wallet want to run away very fast 😵

By the time I upgraded to a P3 700MHz in 2000 memory prices were more affordable and I got 128MB of PC133 SDRAM; Windows 98 SE was a very happy camper at the time 😊

The 1993 Vectra 5 XU workstation I have came with 64MB of RAM originally.