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Comment by andrewstuart | Hacker News Reader

I worked extensively with Windows 2 back in the day.

Possibly even with Windows 1.0 I can't quite recall.

It was a constant battle to get enough RAM for applications to run. Futzing around with himem.sys and moving around network drivers and stuff in high memory.

Windows applications had to run within the first 640K of RAM. In reality, around that time most corporate machines were 80286 machines and as I recall a high specced machine usually had 2MB RAM.

Kinda weird to think that working, useful Windows applications ran on systems with that little memory.

Ugh I'm glad those days are gone.

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> It was a constant battle to get enough RAM for applications to run. Futzing around with himem.sys and moving around network drivers and stuff in high memory.

This was a battle even if you weren't running Windows. Many DOS programs wanted enough of that first 640K that you had to jump through hoops to fit them in.

Rebooting 15 times with different driver ordering in the hope you'll find another 3KB of RAM to get the application to run. Really sucked if you were booting from floppy.

QEMM was a life saver in this regard.

so qemm was a configurable mapper ?

QEMM was way more aggressive in clawing out the memory blocks from all nooks and crannies, definitely was more configurable and also had a way to test different configurations of device drivers (ie CONFIG.SYS) fully automatically, so you just started it, go to eat/whatever (pray what it wouldn't lock up) and come back to the best result.

Yes, QEMM was my goto for quite a while for this. I also ran DESQView once I got a computer that could make good use of it.

I remember I'd save random mouse drivers I found on different machines at school looking for the one that used the least amount of ram. God, what a nightmare.

When I was a kid I really wanted to play Ultima VII and getting that game to work right with a sound card and mouse was a game within itself for a newbie. I think it used its own proprietary memory manger just to make it harder. Eventually I was able to figure it out by making the right boot disk and config.sys, but man what a pain.

That game was amazing and I remember doing the exact same thing. Had to disable ems memory and boot the computer so that the game engines memory manager had enough to work with.

Honestly that game probably set in motion my career path in IT.

My course of action was to run Memmaker, and let it take care of (almost) everything. It usually worked fine. Sometimes I had to fine-tune config.sys/autoexec.bat to make a bit more room or disable EMS, but those were edge cases.

Now that I think about it, it'd be fun to know how Memmaker works internally, but I can't seem to find info on that. Maybe no one has done such analysis... yet.

> Now that I think about it, it'd be fun to know how Memmaker works internally, but I can't seem to find info on that. Maybe no one has done such analysis... yet.

It has been a long time...doesn't it just go through and LOADHIGH all the obvious possibilities? I feel like it maybe had some library of candidates it would check.

I never had this program, I think I did it all manually after analyzing config.sys and autoexec.bat on systems with more free ram than I had. It makes me realize how much knowledge I just mined from school computers.

> Kinda weird to think that working, useful Windows applications ran on systems with that little memory.

> Ugh I'm glad those days are gone.

I'm quite the opposite... i miss the times when applications could run in a few megs of ram.... nowaday just a browser showing a simple weather report wastes 2 gigs+ of ram.

I was there. They were perhaps not shit applications, but they were extremely basic.

It’s a nostalgic fantasy to look back at that stuff imagining it’s in any way comparable to what users expect today.

I don’t care about applications wasting RAM. Modern machines have plenty of cores and RAM and the software is unbelievably powerful today.

I have some nostalgia for those days (I have a huge collection of vintage computers).

But it wasn’t “the good old days”, in which software was done right and now it’s all sloppy and bloated and lazy. Not at all.

I’m glad of modern software, operating systems and tools. Back then there was always something you wanted to do but couldn’t because the software to do it didn’t exist yet - very frustrating. Now almost anything you want to do, you can because someone has developed the stuff you need to do it.

I’m super glad I was there for the early days but glad they’ve passed.

> I don’t care about applications wasting RAM. Modern machines have plenty of cores and RAM and the software is unbelievably powerful today.

I do care when applications waste a lot of RAM and cores but application performance is still terrible. Looking at you, Microsoft Teams. I don't remember mIRC ever being a slouch, even on a Windows 95 PC with 8mb of RAM.

Yep, skype is horrible too (hmm... could there be any connection, I wonder who bought skype a few years ago...), even if you use the same functionality as with irc clients (just text chat). Fucking slow to respond, replaces code snippets with emoticons and every time you send anyone an URL, it has microsoft servers open that url... "just in case"... even if it's a http://192.168.1.100/ url, which is clearly on a private ip address, and there's no way microsoft servers will be able to connect to that, but you'll still have to wait for a timeout before the message gets through.

I came here to make a similar comment. I've made the same Teams/mIRC comment before myself.

But you paid a shitton of money for those modern machines with modern amounts of ram and cpu cores, and threw away a bunch of still working hardware for that.

And in a few years, your writing software (*office, word, whatever) won't gain any memorable new features, but the current 32gigs of ram suddenly won't be enough anymore, and you'll buy a new machine, say how you don't care if Word uses 40gigs of ram, because you have 256gigs installed and it doesn't matter...

My firefox is currently using 7 gigs of ram, and i have 23 tabs open... al the information in all those 23 tabs is maybe 20 megabytes, and that includes the pictures in them.

Look at mobile phones... you use your browser, chat programs, take and send photos and sometimes even call a person using one... and after a few years you're still doing the same, but the apps have grown so much in both size and ram usage, that you have to replace your phone, even though you still need and use the same functionality you used when you bought it. Yes, games got better and look nicer, but for most "old people", the only reason to waste money and create e-waste is bloat, because developers can't optimize anymore.

The idea that RAM requirements are going up so much all the time doesn’t seem to match reality if you ask me.

The fact that I’m still getting by totally fine with an old 8GB on my old laptop is frankly speaking insane. It’s from 2015. Back in the 90s using an 8 year old machine for anything modern would have been unthinkable. OK, it can’t do the latest games or 8k video editing. There are some modern tasks it can’t do. But with everything else there’s no big difference with my newer machines.

I can still get by with RAM that’s within an order of magnitude of my 2008 gaming computer. Even for games. Isn’t that crazy? With everything else the requirements (disk size and GPU transistors) have gone up like 2x orders of magnitude.

There’s been some jumps in ram requirements over the years but often it has been for important things like browser sandboxing or HiDPI/retina displays.

There is some validity to the frustration. The switch to MS teams at work was associated with a big jump in the RAM needed for a usable system. But I also get why.. the pace of development of MS teams has been extremely fast which would’ve been hard without electron. I don’t miss Skype for business.

And now they’ve worked on a version that’s more optimised? If Teams is optimised I can get by with 8-16GB for a long time

Office 2000: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_2000#System_r...

Memory: 16 MB (Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Me) 32 MB (Windows NT 4.0 SP3, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008)

Office 2021: https://microsoft.fandom.com/wiki/Microsoft_Office_2021

> 4GB RAM

So, an 128x increase of ram requirement (32->4096) in ~21 years. Do you actually get 128x more of anything? Does it do 128x more? I mean sure, the icons are high-res, so maybe a few 100kB of ram for that, but 128x more? Even the 2016 version required 2 gigs less... and the 'whats new'? https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/what-s-new-in-off...

For some things, I agree... a jump form notepad.exe to word brings many new features and an increase in memory usage... but the new word versions keep growing and growing in size but the new feature set doesn't bring anything that would excuse such a large increase in usage.

Yes, teams was broken, and it used less memory if you used it in a browser than a native app.. so there's no excuse for that, especially since the native app was mostly a browser in disguise.

I mostly blame lazyness and overspeced developer computers for that... why optimize when you can be lazy if you have 128 gigs of ram? If we made developers use (for testing) 5 year old, mid-tier laptops bought that were available in supermarkets (so something your grandma bought in walmart on a sale 5 years ago), the world of memory usage would be a much nicer place. Same for mobile phones.. test the app on a 3 year mid-range phone, and if it's too slow, it's going to be too slow for many users.

First result on walmart.com for a "laptop"? https://www.walmart.com/ip/SGIN-15-6inch-Laptop-4GB-DDR4-128...

quad core celeron with 4 gigs of ram. This is what my grandma would have bought. Barely enough for word today, probably not enough in a few years when a new version comes out.

> the software is unbelievably powerful today.

yet still not able to draw a cursor or a scrollbar so i need to wait 2 seconds in word for the cursor to appear or 1 second, after i move the mouse to the side, for the scrollbar to appear.

Imagine what it would be like by now if all software had kept up the early ratio of what could be accomplished per kilobyte of memory and per megahertz of processor performance. Especially per kilobyte of code itself.

Now it takes GB and GHz to accomplish the same office work as 30 years ago, and the UI responsiveness is slower by comparison. This should have only improved as more advanced hardware was deployed, so the root cause has got to be a defective software approach(s) over the long run.

Not the promising brave new world that seemed like it would make interactions with PC's orders of magnitude better by the time the 21st century came along.

But hey, you get ads in your start menu now, that's something! :)

I feel like I'm going crazy in these threads. UIs have really awful responsiveness these days and it is a source of constant annoyance to me. And then they hide all the elements like that, gating commonly used functions behind unpredictable delays so that users can't even find them unless they know to rub the magic spot until it appears.

I clicked the start menu on a PC today and was greeted with spinning circles on an otherwise black box for at least 5-10 whole seconds before it showed anything.

The world is going crazy and we are doomed to suffer. I pray some of these trends will reverse.

Some youngins today complain that regular apps/programs look old and "not modern". I want to slap them hard.

> There was a demon in memory. They said whoever challenged him would lose. Their programs would lock up, their machines would crash, and all their data would disintegrate.

> The demon lived at the hexadecimal memory address A0000, 655,360 in decimal, beyond which no more memory could be allocated. He lived behind a barrier beyond which they said no program could ever pass. They called it the 640 K barrier.

From https://www.filfre.net/2017/04/the-640-k-barrier/.

> Windows applications had to run within the first 640K of RAM. In reality, around that time most corporate machines were 80286 machines and as I recall a high specced machine usually had 2MB RAM.

There was a protected mode version of Windows 2.0 that would run on 386s and allow larger memory access. I believe it also ran on 286s, but protected mode was crippled quite a bit on those chips.

I can't remember the specifics now - it was 35 years ago or something... but as I recall the memory situation wasn't sorted out until Windows 3.0. That's what made Windows 3.0 so exciting - the memory model.

That was windows "enhanced mode", when running on 386. 286 could not return to real mode, once entering protected mode (by design; a way was found later by resetting the cpu) and had no vm86 mode. 386 had these features, and by the time of windows 3.0 release it was popular enough, so they could be used.

No, even without those 386 features, Windows 3.0 did introduce a new memory system that allowed Windows applications to more easily use up to 16MB of RAM IIRC.

For Windows 2.x it was less about protected mode than the MMU -- paging allowed EMS (bank selection in real mode) to be done by the CPU.

Windows 1 was hard to work with because they used a strict tiling model for window management. All apps had to fit into a screen grid of non-overlapping tiled windows. You very quickly got to tiles that were too small to be useful and hurt the usefulness of Windows as a product.

By Windows 2, they had given up on that tiling model and gone with overlapping windows.

What network were you on? I'm curious, I never had anything except dial-up (BBS) back in those days.

NetWare, I suppose. IPX was big even under pure DOS.

In that era you had to load the network drivers before windows, it was all DOS based. It wasn't until windows for workgroups that windows based networking was a thing.

Netware, I also worked with Microsoft's SMB and a few other lesser known things. 3Com something or other. There were some interesting network types around then too - unfortunately alot of coax networks (a disconnected cable would bring the whole network down), Banyan Vines, some IBM token ring which had some weird cables and connectors. Cat 5 networking came in not long after.

Back then there were all sorts of protocols flying over the network. IPX/SPX, XNS mainly. The one protocol NOT present on our systems was TCP/IP.

Nice, must have been interesting to use such a variety of tech that people were still figuring out. Yeah, I got directly into TCP/IP with trumpet winsock. All the stuff prior was before my time (the stuff that I had access to anyway).

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