I was at a graphic design tradeshow back in the mid 90's and there was a guy there demonstrating this Photoshop alternative called Live Picture or Live Photos or something like that. And he had a somewhat large, at the time, print image on the screen, probably 16mb or so, and was zooming in and out and resizing the window and it was redrawing almost instantly.
This was AMAZING.
Photoshop at the time would take many many seconds to zoom in/out.
One person in the group asked, "Yeah, but how much memory is in that machine?"
The guy hemmed and hawed a bit and finally said "It's got a bit, but not a lot, just 24mb."
"Yeah, well that explains it." Nobody had 24mb of RAM at that time. Our "big" machine had 16mb.