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0 pointsRedShift13y ago0 comments

Windows 95 ran an entire OS with decent UI in 8 MB of RAM. One really has to wonder, where is all the RAM going these days? I think the knowledge of doing anything with only 8 MB of RAM has gone away, we don't know how to do it anymore.

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HL33tibCe73y ago

Your comment brings the following Monty Python sketch to mind:

“What did the Romans ever do for us?

… All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health”

Replace “Romans” with “Increased RAM usage”.

mid-kid3y ago

It's not the knowledge - it's the increased complexity of the entire stack, all the way down to the hardware. A modern linux kernel image is easily bigger than 8MB, and that needs to be in memory at all times. Why? Because of all the functionality it has these days, to fit all the possible usecases people need. Windows 95 didn't have Swap, didn't support many filesystems, didn't have central logging, didn't have ASLR, let alone support for containers, and many other features I'm forgetting along the way.

Sure you could strip away a lot of that functionality, even at the distribution level (by for example not using an init system at all, instead just one shell script to initialize things), but then you'd end up with an operating system that's not general purpose for today's standards anymore.

nybble413y ago

Don't forget how much higher screen resolutions are these days. Color depth also. Those 8 MiB systems were driving single-buffered displays with perhaps 800x600 resolution at eight bits per pixel, with a color palette and dithering, which requires about 480 KB to hold the framebuffer image. Most applications would render directly into the framebuffer. A full HD (1080p) screen at 32 bits per pixel requires 8 MiB just to store the framebuffer (16 MiB with double-buffering), and that's not counting any of the input data or code needed for rendering. Figure on two or three times that to hold separate textures for each window (depending on the window sizes and how much they overlap) so that they can be composited live with desktop effects.

rasz3y ago

> Windows 95 didn't have Swap

it did have virtual Memory and swap

kiwijamo3y ago

Can confirm. I remember it swapping heaps on my 32MB machine.

dale_glass3y ago

A huge amount of it is going to graphics. A 4K screen is ~31 MB just for the framebuffer. In comparison, 640x480x16 colors is 150K of memory.

Windows 95 also didn't do things the modern way. It didn't keep an image of every application's windows in RAM. It kept track of what covered up what, and then asked applications to redraw themselves when needed.

Another huge amount is going to features like internationalization. Unicode is a beast that takes a good amount of code to implement, and Arial Unicode is a ~20 MB TTF file.

Modern luxuries like being able to tweet in Japanese are quite expensive.

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