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.

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.