The power of a 500 MHz Pentium III system with 128 MB of RAM.
Thanks to an article on DesktopLinux.com, I was reading about the Asus Eee PC 701 system. One interesting thing about this system is that it will reportedly run a variant of Xandros Desktop Linux.
The article goes on to note that this device will apparently have 512 MB of RAM. It’s the paragraph following that portion of the article that I find most interesting: While this may not sound like enough RAM to run Xandros, this Linux operating system is well-known for its ability to run with a bare minimum of RAM. In a DesktopLinux.com review in 2006, we were able to run the latest version, Xandros Desktop 4.0, on a far less powerful system: a 6-year-old Compaq Deskpro EN Desktop with a 500MHz Pentium III processor, 128MB of RAM and a 10GB hard drive.
I find it laughable that 128 MB of RAM is considered “a bare minimum” today. It’s actually a very large amount of RAM. Back in the 1980s and even into the late 1990s, those of us in the corporate world would have been amazed to have that much RAM at our disposal. At one job, we used a Sun SPARCstation 1 with 1 MB of RAM. This was around 1991 or 1992. On this system, we ran not only a fairly busy email server, but also a couple of databases and several other backend applications. Looking back, I don’t know how we got by with such a system. Perhaps software was written with more care in those days. Regardless, we had some of the older system administrators telling us how lucky we were to have 1 MB. They recalled the days when 64 KB of RAM was considered a lot.
When it comes to desktop systems, there’s absolutely no legitimate reason why a capable desktop system needs more than 128 MB of RAM. In the early 1990s we had NeXTstation systems that worked comfortably with 12 MB of RAM. Keep in mind that these systems came with a very capable suite of desktop software, still comparable in many ways to Mac OS X today. And even then, we were dealing with relatively heavy-weight technologies like Objective-C, Display PostScript, Mach, and so forth. Yet those systems still performed very well, with 100 times less RAM than the typical low-end consumer PC today!
July 22nd, 2007 at 2:14 am
>> When it comes to desktop systems, there’s absolutely no legitimate reason why a capable desktop system needs more than 128 MB of RAM.
More RAM needed by todays desktops in used for displaying eye-candy (GUI)
July 22nd, 2007 at 3:05 am
Intel giveth and Microsoft taketh away.
July 22nd, 2007 at 4:39 am
Well, this is something that still strikes me every time MS launches a new Windows version. Each generation required an _order of magnitude_ bigger memory footprint. With Windows 3.1, we were in the KBs, moving to MBs, Windows 95 needed MBs, Windows XP started behaving “nicely” when you had 256MBs, and now Windows Vista will require a GB and still be lacking if you don’t have the latest in hardware.
Software bloat is a mess. I can run a perfectly capable Ubuntu destkop (itself quite bloated) in half the machine.
Software developers stopped caring about performance two language generations ago. I myself use Python when I can, and resort to .NET when I don’t.
July 22nd, 2007 at 4:47 am
seems like you also stopped caring about performance two language generations ago David.
Also the recommended system requirements for XP and Ubuntu are the practically the same. So, I don’t quite buy into your whole statement.
July 22nd, 2007 at 5:08 am
First, the memory available on systems a decade or more old has no bearing on the modern concept of “minimal”. I can’t recall the last time I was on a system with less than 512, and even that is rare.
However, as an embedded developer, we don’t use Linux on our embedded systems specifically because Linux hogs way too much memory for a resource-limited, real-time environment like a network switch. So, at least for us embedded folks, there still are places today where you can find memory-limited systems where the original poster’s argument is in fact laughable.
July 22nd, 2007 at 5:38 am
1 Meg of RAM! And we liked it! We LOVED it!
July 22nd, 2007 at 10:52 am
That would be oh so nice, static, if XP were equivalent to Ubuntu.
XP is a joke.
July 22nd, 2007 at 12:08 pm
I presume you’ve all seen this?
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000020.html
I realise he’s the spawn of the devil because he once took Microsoft’s shilling, but I still think he makes a good point.
July 22nd, 2007 at 5:54 pm
Well, my original comment was vaporized when your little
blog shat out some sort of PHP/DB connectivity error. For
some reason I’m rewriting the comment:
If you’re working with images, it is perfectly imaginable
and common to use several hundred MB of memory. A few medium
(or even one large image) combined with undo histories can
easily eat up several hundred or even well over a gig of
memory. When I set my image editor to only use 128 MB, I am
quite annoyed by the lack of undo history, and I only edit
relatively small images at a maximum of 3kx2k pixels one at
a time.
There are many other “legitimate” uses of gross amounts of
memory. However, I do admit that these uses for the common
PC user to be few and far between.
On the other hand, I will argue the typical “illegitimate”
uses of memory are in fact quite legitimate when you take in
to account the extreme difficulty it would take to optimize
the memory footprint of modern software as much as is
practically possible. Given how cheap memory is, the market
for such software is very small. This is rather fortunate in
my opinion, because although I find an occasional
optimization hack to be challenging and fun, I would find it
very tiresome and tedious to do such optimizations again and
again out of necessity.
Do I think it’s worth having an extra 60 MB of RAM (at about
$1 / 16 MB) for all of Firefox’s bloated features (including
for example quicker backwards navigation)? Absolutely.
July 22nd, 2007 at 6:16 pm
And yes, I too am nostalgic for the days of I hacked QBASIC on a 486. But I’d rather retire from the IT world than go back to that. I’m gleefully looking forward to when I have terabytes of memory at my disposal.
July 23rd, 2007 at 12:55 am
With just Xorg, emacs, and opera the memory is pretty much consumed. For emacs I don’t know that memory consumption was much of a design criteria however I see on Ubuntu its using about 10mb-13mb, which isn’t that bad.
July 23rd, 2007 at 2:39 am
Software expands to fill the hardware that contains it. If everyone’s got shiny 3GHz dual-core processors, 2Gb of memory and a 300Gb hard drive it’s only natural that we’ll all run software that, for no good reason, actually needs all that.
July 23rd, 2007 at 6:58 am
Actually McAfee AV chews up about 300 Mb on my machine. Anyone can recommend better alternatives?
October 12th, 2007 at 2:16 am
AVG Free
http://free.grisoft.com