This came up in the RachelByTheBay thread the other day[1] about how she got started... My computer progression started with a Vic-20 (3kB of RAM), followed by an XT (640kB), followed by a Pentium 133 (16MB of RAM). While the Vic and the XT really taught me a lot about how to write lean & mean code, the Pentium really acts like my baseline for what a resource-constrained GUI system can actually accomplish. I could surf the web and talk in multiple IRC rooms quite comfortably (woo mIRC!), probably with ICQ running as well. The fact that Slack is currently idling with an RSS of 1.3GB is bloody offensive in that lens. 81x the memory footprint of the entire machine I used to do all my web browsing on.
I really like your idea of encouraging people to try getting code running on older machines. I really understand that someone who didn't cut their teeth on a 3kB RAM machine won't have the same appreciation for constrained memory computing, and I think your suggestion is a great way to introduce them to it.
I really like your idea of encouraging people to try getting code running on older machines. I really understand that someone who didn't cut their teeth on a 3kB RAM machine won't have the same appreciation for constrained memory computing, and I think your suggestion is a great way to introduce them to it.
Thanks for the thought!
[1]http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/04/04/learn/