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Comment by badc0ffee | Hacker News Reader

I remember booting up Debian into an X11 session on a laptop with only 8 MB of RAM.

(This would have been circa 2000, and I think I had to try a few different distros before finding one that worked. Also I don't think I did anything with it beyond Xterm and Xeyes.)

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Ran linux in an 8 mb 486 in the 90s. X ran in 256 color mode and twm or mwm were the window managers. It was so hard to use though. Had to setup modelines settings for your monitor in a textfile and theoretically could damage it with wrong iputs. Programming X fuggedabout it - I was from turbo borland msdos land where everything was neatly documented and designed with clear examples to make programming easy. I was lucky to get an x program to even compile. Hard to find books back then. Pre Amazon. Xv image viewer probably the only thing i used X for. Actually used the machine most of the time in the text mode terminals using alt function keys and used lynx as a browser (before javascript… but gopher was becoming obsolete at that point… ftp still popular though ) with random assortment of svgalib programs for any graphical stuff. Still there was something magical about seeing that black and white check pattern come up and the little X mouse cursor appear.. like there were… possibilities.

Yes, I remember making my 12" IBM monitor scream as I put the wrong mode information in the config file for X. I think I was on RedHat 5.0 from a cover CD, on a 486 DX2 with 64 MB of RAM (I was poor; everyone else was on Pentium IIs or IIIs and I was using computers the school threw out, scraping together motherboards and RAM).

Yeah, it was a different world. I worked at a company using X + Motif on SCO Unix back in the early 90s. I had a 386sx with 8mb ram + 6 MB on an ISA expansion card! When you changed a header file constant (like a label string) and had to recompile the ~1 MB(!) executable, it really was coffee break time - compile time was ~1 hour for a full rebuild. Strangely enough, our current project on a 16-core VM also takes nearly an hour for a full rebuild - but we have parallel build options that go much faster.

I also ran Linux+X11 on my 486 (for some grad work) with 32 MB, IIRC. ATI Mach32 graphics card, Nec 5FGe monitor (loved that one!), etc..

You have no ccache setup for it?

ccache was released 2002. This was 1992.

I am amazed to discover that Xfce of that era was so CDEsque: https://www.linux.co.cr/desktops/review/2000/xfce-3.3/help.h...

It was originally created as a CDE clone (thus the original name "XForms Common Environment")

I'm always wanted to know what XFCE means

That would have been then already some kind of anachronism. 8MiB RAM was workable (but only barely so with X11) in the early nineties. Late nineties 64MiB or more were common.

Yes, it was an old laptop at the time.

Back in 1993, I remember booting SLS Linux on a 386 laptop with 3 megs of RAM (1 meg on the motherboard, 2 meg expansion.) I could barely get it to startx and open an xterm, so I mostly used it in from the console!

Before Linux, I was experimenting with Coherent.

I doesn’t feel like that long ago when I built a swarm of Arch Linux based thin clients which PXE booted from a SLES DHCP & NFS host.

That was probably around 2010 or 2015.

Those images had to run on a thin client with 512 MB RAM.

I think I chose XFCE as the DE.

In college we had a network of Sun workstations and some of the machines had only 8MB of RAM, IIRC. This was in the 90s.

Then again, the X desktop was really minimal and I would use them mostly to code in C using a terminal.

My first PC had 16 MB of RAM, which later obviously became too slow to be usable. I remember I had to wait around a minute for Fallout to load a level, which you had to do fairly frequently.

I remember buying a bulky external 2MB RAM extension (I think I bought another 2MB) before that for my Amiga 500 running a full desktop OS already on 512k 'Chipmemory' using it mostly to actually as a TempFS to accelerate loading. That was beginning to mid 90s, I guess. But running netbsd on the Amiga meant that you would already at that time need 16MB of RAM and a CPU with an MMU as well as an HDD (my friend across the street did that with his A1200 I think I remember). You would only do it if you wanted more networking beyond BBS I guess.

4 minutes to load Enclave level save game with pentium 200mhz with 32mb ram

32 MB? The opulence!

Me too, but I was able to do it around 1995-1996 :) Also remember Windows95 can boot with 4MB of RAM, and was decent with 12MB.

Windows95 was decent even with 8 MB, on a 66 MHz or 100 MHz 486 CPU.

With either 4 MB or only a 386 CPU, it was definitely crippled, making an upgrade not worthwhile.

Windows 95 on a 386 CPU with enough RAM was alright. Not fast but very useable.

https://youtu.be/Pw2610paPYM?t=72

But most 386 didn't have 8+ megabytes, and some 386 had a 286 like data bus, making it even slower. (386SX)

On paper a 386sx is slower than a 386dx, and certainly is in terms of RAM access. But in practice you'd need some expensive hardware to fully take advantage of that speed, like EISA cards and a motherboard that supported them (or, MCA cards on one of the higher end IBM PS/2 models). The typical ISA cards of the era were limited to 8 MHz and 16 bits no matter what processor or motherboard you used.

The 386dx could also use a full 32-bit address space, whereas the 386sx had 24 address lines like the 286. But again, having more than 16 MB would have been expensive at the time.

> Windows 95 on a 386 CPU with enough RAM was alright.

I benchmarked it for PC Pro Magazine when it came out.

We had to borrow a 4MB 386SX from a friend of the editor's, as we had nothing that low-end left in the labs.

In our standard benchmarks, which used MS Word, MS Excel, PowerPoint, Illustrator, Photoshop, WinZip, and a few other real apps, Win95 1.0, not 95A or OSR2, was measurable faster than Windows for Workgroups 3.11 on MS-DOS 6.22, hand-optimised.

When it needed the RAM, 95 could shrink the disk cache to essentially nothing. (Maybe 4 kB or something.) Win3 could not do that.

It was SLOW but under heavy load it was quicker than Win3 on the lowest-end supported hardware.

Under light load, Win3 was quicker, but Win95 scaled down very impressively indeed.

I don’t know how resolution maps to ram in x11 but I assume at least one byte per pixel. Based on that assumption, there’s no chance you’d even be able to power a 4k monitor with 8mb of ram, let alone the rest of the system.

Presumably every pixel is 32 bits rather than just 8. So the count starts at 33.2MB just for the display.

It is now, but back then it was 1 byte, with typical resolutions being 800x600. There were high-color modes but for a period it was rare to have good enough hardware for it.

I have run x11 in 16-color and 256-color mode, but it was not fun. The palette would get swapped when changing windows, which was quite disorienting. Hardware that could do 16-bit color was common by the late 90s.

Much better to stick to 1 bit per pixel. :-)

Like in Sun SPARCStation ELC. No confusing colors or shades.

1bpp (at low resolution) is still relevant today on epaper screens, though some of them now allow for shades of grey or even color.

Most aren't all that low res either... 300dpi is standard.

But what if it's a UTF8 bit? Then it'd be 2 bits.

Which proves time travel exists, all those "two bits" references in old Westerns.

Fun thing - SGI specifically used 256 color mode a lot, to reduce memory usage even if you used 24bit outputs. So long as you used defaults of their Motif fork, everything you didn't specifically request to use more colors would use 256 color visuals which then were composited in hardware.

Damn pixel bit-depth bloat!

This was the main driver of VGA memory size for a time - if you spent money on 2MB card instead of a 1MB, you could have higher resolution or bit depth.

if you had a big enough framebuffer in your display adapter, though, X11 could display more than your main ram could support - the design, when using "classic way", allowed X server to draw directly on framebuffer memory (just like GDI did)

X11 was designed to support bit depths down to 1 bit per pixel.

X11, yes, but the modern graphics cards, no.

graphics cards at the time X11 was designed though, yes

Correct, 4k is very modern by these standards. But then I'm old, so perhaps it's all about perspective.

Back in the days when computers had 8MB of RAM to handle all that MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 goodness, we were still in the territory of VGA [0], and SVGA [1] territory, and the graphics cards (sorry, integrated graphics on the motherboard?! You're living in the future there, that's years away!), had their own RAM to support those resolutions and colour depths.

Of course, this is all for PCs. By the mid-1990s you could get a SPARCstation 5 [2] with a 24" Sun-branded Sony Trinitron monitor that was rather more capable.

[0] Maxed out at 640 x 480 in 16-colour from an 18-bit colour gamut

[1] The "S" is for Super: 1280 x 1024 with 256 colours!

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARCstation_5

Good thing 4k monitors didn't exist in 2000

My comment was tongue in cheek while simultaneously highlighting that at least some increased ram consumption is required for modern computing, and highlighting how incredibly far technology has come in 2.5 decades.

A few years back, I had fun setting up an old X11 terminal I had in my rather eccentric retro computing collection.

But I don’t think I had much memory in it. I had ordered a fair bit more, but maybe only 4-8M.

I did get it to work with only minor difficulties, but man only the simplest of applications could run. The barebones basic GUI text editor that came with Ubuntu couldn’t even start up.

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