I remember that EMACS meant Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping, a reference to the Emacs editor requiring a system with 8 MB of memory and then still swapping. It was considered an exaggeration. Even Windows 95 could run OK-ish on a system with 4 MB of memory, with 8 MB being plenty. We have gained some things in the meantime, and lost some too.

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trashface 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

EMACS was indeed big and fat back in the day but hasn't grown much and is downright svelte by today's standards. Currently its using ~80MB on my system, compared to 7GB for firefox, 1GB for signal desktop (a chat app! yes I know its electron) and ~840 MB for gnome shell.

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pseudohadamard 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

My main desktop PC has 4GB of RAM running Windows 7 with all the crap disabled. The OS uses a few hundred MB, with everything else free for software development or whatever I'm doing with it.

I don't think I could get Windows 11 to even boot in 4GB even though it does about the same as Windows 7 did.

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hulitu 2 days ago | parent [-]

> even though it does about the same as Windows 7 did.

That is your opinion. Did you check the number of svchost.exe instances on the two OSs ? Did you check the number of system processes.

Win 11 has telemetry, to improve it. It really cares about your security, although the bad guys are still able to install ransomware. And, the most important, Windows 11 has rounded corners and 3D acceleration for the 2D windowing system.

See ? A lot of improvements. Now of course, you have 2 (gray) colour choices: light or dark. But this is because of astonishing advances in Computer Science.

And, last but not least, a quote from John Malkovitch: see youtube Space Force.

	▲	pseudohadamard 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, I did forget that it has the visually stunning flat UI that everyone kept begging Microsoft to add. So maybe the multi-gigabyte memory size increase was worth it after all.