I felt old when I realized that someone had put my first "big boy" unix computer, a decstation 3100 with 24 mb of ram, onto a business card.
Even the computers we think about as the first "PCs", the IBM 5150, shipped with 16 or 64kb of main memory. They were much closer to machines like the Apple II or the Commodore 64 than most people realize.
105 mb disks meant (almost) everything was NFS mounted, and NFS did a great job.
But to your point, with 8 megs, Emacs Makes A Computer Slow.
And there was no budget for upgrades to anything.