Thinking back to my community college days in 2020 (right before the pandemic!), I used to rock a crappy old dual core laptop with 4GB of RAM running Fedora. Browsing the web was less than ideal and YouTube barely worked. For certain classes (the big hassle was a DB class after I transferred) running the course software was very taxing and I had a harder time with that compared to other students as a result. I remember Zoom barely working on it, but only if I didn't use the camera. I look back at this experience a bit fondly as it made me rely more on the terminal and I shifted away from slow laggy GUIs to TUIs/NeoVim. That said, for most other individuals in that position it really is a big limiting factor for their education.

Recently I was tutoring (for college essays and math) at a local high/middle school and most students browsed the web on their smart phones, but those that didn't were limited to school issued Chromebooks which were ungodly slow. Some of these students served as translators for their parents and I was under the impression that they used these devices to pay bills and for other household tasks as well. This experience is why to this day I try to keep the websites I make light on dependancies (I don't like react) and fast to load (sub 300kb ideally).

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grebc 2 days ago | parent [-]

It really is a sad reflection of our craft as a profession that 16GB is the bare minimum to do basic office tasks like email/browse a news website.

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BobbyTables2 21 hours ago | parent [-]

It was already sad when 1GB became the minimum. Having 256MB was an amazing luxury for a long time .

I used to do email/browsing/games on 8MB of RAM. Upgraded to 24MB and was able to print a poster sized photo that I scanned with a handheld scanner.

I have 2000x as much RAM now, about 3000x more CPU, but hard to say what really changed for so much increase.

Yeah, full motion video is now more trivial. Gaming graphics certainly improved but not 1000x more fun.

I probably have more computing power today in my room than medium sized universities had back in the day.

	▲	grebc 19 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I can only remember having 256MB as the minimum in my formative years, with a 1GHz Celeron. It ran XP fine and some very basic games(Ultima Online, strategy games like C&C). Not much has really changed, I’d argue what young ones do these days is even less basic with more bloat.