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Comment by Koshkin | Hacker News Reader

Just wanted to note that at the time Linux appeared back in the 90's, 46MB would have been an insanely large amount of RAM. (And so it still is today in the majority of embedded situations.)

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Used to boot Linux from a 1.2 MB 5 1/4" floppy with the kernel, network drivers, shell, and X Windows server on an i386 with 8 MB RAM. Made for a perfectly fine X terminal.

In the snow. Uphill.

With a one button mouse, no less.

going both ways on the X-axis.

Definitely. My first Linux box was a 386-SX/20 mhz with 3 megs of RAM (1 on the motherboard, 2 expansion.) Originally I was running Coherent, a closed-source Unix clone.

By '97 or so, I had a whopping 32 megs on a Pentium 100.

Agreed. Nice perspective. Our first home computer was a Windows 3.1 machine, which had 16MB of RAM IIRC... Even if I recall incorrectly, it definitely wasn't 48Megs.

I had a friend with Cyrix 6x86 MMX which had 32 MB of RAM.

That was a large amount of memory for a Windows 3.1 machine. 8MB systems were still common in the 95/98 days.

You may be right... it may have been only 8. It was a while ago (obviously) and I was a kid who didn't really commit these things to memory very well. I do remember that we had to open up SYSTEM.INI in notepad and comment out some of the Windows internals and reboot the machine just to have enough ram to play Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness.

Yep, I’ve used freesco linux which was installed on 1.44mb floppy. I’ve used it for routing internet for a few neighbors, to lower the cost of expensive dsl line.

I remember running X on Linux on a system with 20 megs of ram.

I Wonder how much is bloat and how much is trading memory use for speed. And the obvious part of 64-bit Vs 32-bit...

Could you recommend a Linux distro that runs on computers with less than 46MB of RAM?

OpenBSD once the kernel is slimmed down.

OpenWRT still mostly works with 8MB flash and 32MB RAM, but it works better with twice that.

Came here to say the same thing. You could run X with Netscape in 12 Megs of RAM.

And by late 90's 46MB would be so-so for Windows 98.

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