It's bizarre to see 8GB spoken of as barely sufficient for basic uses. I remember when the baseline was measured in megabytes.
I figured maybe they meant hard drive space (which I could kind of imagine being that large).
I agree that It is silly that an OS that is still basically NT 3.1 needs 8GB to run.
In early XP days, it was 32MB for the OS and 2GB for Firefox.
I suppose the answer to the riddle is that now every program included in Windows is an Electron abomination with its own "Firefox".
Soon, every "Firefox" will include its own slightly different LLM.
NOTEPAD.EXE will run at 2FPS on your 256GB AI box.
8GB in a computer was considered good in a consumer performance machine in 2010. 16 years before that was 6-8MB.
I agree that the time periods you mention saw different growth patterns and I would blame the stagnant software for the situation —it has slowly grown into the hardware with no real feature improvement.
Even the current path to exponential RAM increases is a naked king —1T models are only slightly better than 1B models at following instructions.
They call this progress.
The other day I heard on a podcast a guy complaining how hard it was to do backend software in terms of performance, his tooling? Node.js.
Naturally when even Microsoft gets these folks as coders that is what we get, Webview2 all over the place on basic OS, C or C++ code that barely works.