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Comment by shakna | Hacker News Reader

> Windows 95 ran in 8 GB of RAM. (Well, officially 4 GB for marketing purposes, but no one thought that was actually enough.) I would be really impressed to see a graphical Linux environment that could run in that amount of RAM.

Huh? Windows 95, IIRC, will _refuse to even boot_ if you have more than 480Mb of RAM, let alone 4Gb.

Most machines of the time had 4Mb of RAM. Something seriously powerful had 16Mb.

As for running a modern 32bit Linux on something with minimal hardware... The creator of "uARM" [0] says that it's useable, and it uses a "30-pin 16MB SIMM" piece of RAM. But honestly, the speed of the RAM is more important than the size, for that project.

[0] https://dmitry.gr/index.php?r=05.Projects&proj=07.%20Linux%2...

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> Most machines of the time had 4Mb of RAM. Something seriously powerful had 16Mb.

Yes I did mean to write MB rather than GB; thanks for the correction.

On that note, I found this 1995 newspaper article (linked from Wikipedia) on the subject. Conclusion was that W95 ran on 4MB, but slowly:

https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19950924&slug...

Funny that the writer remarks on having a bunch of Windows open and still having "73% resources free". I think I remember reading in one of the contemporary books (maybe Andrew Schulman's Unauthorized Windows 95) that the dialog that shows the % resources free inflates the number significantly.

Long time ago I tried to boot Win3.11 on 4Mb on a PC XT that I had built (including soldering components). It booted but was horribly slow, so I doubt Win95 was usable on 4Mb.

It was technically usable, but very slow. I ran it on a 486 DX2-66 with 4MB of RAM before upgrading to 8MB of RAM. That made a drastic difference.

An XT? That slowness was probably due to the CPU speed than anything else.

With 8Mb the speed was OK for me and most PC XT at the time were not perceived as slow for office or industrial usage.

People used office software like Multiplan or Wordstar without complaining about speed even on Z80 machines. They complained much more about capabilities to connect their brand new printer, or the slowness and limitations of their floppy disks, etc.

Was that 4Mb or 4MB. We had Win 3.11 on 386 with 1MB RAM, which was running but slow. My father paid a large(3rd-world) sum to get it upgraded to 4MB after which it was fast enough for another 6 years including Office, Wordperfect, Visual Basic, Pagemaker etc.

I did run windows 95 with 2MB. It was my main reason to get 2 more bars with overall 4MBs going up to 6 in total. Boot process with 2MB took about 20 to 25 minutes.

> Conclusion was that W95 ran on 4MB, but slowly

Yeah, I clearly remember today that HDD light never going off if you ran Win95 with 4MB RAM. One of the reasons I had to upgrade my PC.

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