[rescue] Memory usage (was Re: Needed: Older laptops)

[Steven M Jones]

Peter Corlett <abuse at cabal.org.uk> wrote:
>
> That might not necessarily be Firefox's fault though. A GUI "Hello,

> world" clocks in at about 40MB.

Insert crusty joke about Motif's Megabyte Window Manager (mwm) here... 

This reminds me how thrilled and horrified I was when I worked for an early CORBA vendor (HyperDesk, a DG spin-off) and learned that a "Hello, World!" program that just logged into the DOM[0] and exited hit 8MB on a SPARC/SunOS 4.x platform in early 1993.

For reference, I think that if you had a shiny new SPARCstation-10/30 with 64MB at this point, you were a very happy camper -- we were running lots of Solbournes and DG AViiON AV300's on peoples' desks, with a 4-way Solbourne 5E/600 (?) and assorted DG AViiON servers in the machine room.

Utter trivia: This was the last place I saw engineers using a real line printer and printing out code listings on 14" wide greenbar on a regular basis.

--S.

[0] Terminology highly vulnerable to bitrot, as I never used CORBA after I left HyperDesk in '94.