alt Hacker NewsMy gaming PC that I built in January 2006 that IIRC I used to simultaneously run Battlefield 2, Trillian, Xfire, Thunderbird, and Winamp with a 1680x1050 monitor had 1 GB of total system RAM.
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I still miss Battlefield 2. There is really nothing like it today, not even close. The dynamics with squads and a commander and A+ physics and overall game balance remain unmatched for all FPS games.
Fortnite, PUBG, COD, all are disgraceful in comparison.
Fun fact, one of the XFire cofounders won Carmack's Ferrari at a Quake Tourney:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Fong#/media/File:John_C...
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I remember within the last decade noting that minesweeper from the windows store took more space than a pretty damn healthy Win98SE install (with minesweeper)...
Before I built a gaming computer circa 2004 I daily drove my family's old beige box that had a 350Mhz Pentium II with 64MB of RAM and Windows 98. I remember running CDex (because ripping CDs was all the rage), Trillian, and ZDaemon all at the same time without a hiccup. What a time to be alive!
I just set up a web server for a hobby project on a $10 Dell PC that has 2GB of RAM welded to the board. After booting Debian 13 it still has 1.6GB of free RAM.
In fact, that seems a lot. Back in ~1996 I was running one of the EFnet servers on a Compaq with 8MB of RAM.
Trillian, good old days. Still remember my icq number
Think about all the performance you could have gained by instead running Trillian and Winamp on an old Thinkpad next to you with even less ram
take me back
Some of us still know how to write software like that. And enjoy doing it.
I made a little conference schedule app a few weeks ago for a conference I was at. I used my own rust UI toolkit, which calls in to cocoa to make use of native UI components. The resulting binary is about 500kb and it uses a couple megs of ram while running. It looks and feels like a totally native iOS app. As far as the OS is concerned, it is.
Even 500kb feels too big for what it is. I’m rewriting the core at the moment, and I think it’ll be more efficient as a result. But I’m still pretty happy with it.