> If the OS and apps you needed to run required 4MB RAM, then you really should have at least 4MB RAM. [...] Set your VM page size to only 1MB more than your physical memory size.
ahhh... I'm fond the days from when you could run whole applications in all of 4MiB -- GUIs included.
Yeah. I had a colleague who used Photoshop a lot. She got management to spring for 30MB of RAM for her machine. I thought that was the most outrageous thing I'd ever heard.
My father used to run a desktop publishing bureau that output people's print jobs onto film, which was then sent to printing presses for printing. This was for magazines, artwork for packaging, etc.
He had a Quadra 950 with 128MB of RAM, which required some pretty exotic SIMMs. That would be a pretty expensive machine in today's money. This was for handling Adobe Illustrator files with large embedded images.
Designers that did print-quality photography, especially posters, have always been crying out for more memory.
In the G3 and G4 days with easy-open computers it wasn't uncommon for one designer to put out a call for more memory to do something intensive, like edit a poster, and other designers would sacrifice a stick or two to the cause. When the job was done they'd put the memory back in the other machines.
Rathole alert, but I worked at a Forestrey Commission Research Station here in the UK in the 90s. One of the mathematicians was running an environmental model on a Sun workstation and it was running out of RAM and swapping and was going to take 2 days to run at that rate.
The department had another identical workstation that wasnt being used just then and I pointed out I could swap half of it's RAM to his machine for the day. He and his boss looked at me as though I was insane. An hour later they called me and asked me to do it, the model run completed in a couple of hours and I swapped the RAM back.
I blew a thousand dollars (Canadian) to upgrade my new Mac Plus to 4 megabytes and the sales guy asked --slightly tongue in cheek but only slightly-- if I was doing CAD for NASA.
I extended memory in my Mac Plus to 4MB for about $5 a few months ago. Nowadays, when anything marked with the "retrocomputing" label can be ridiculously expensive, this kind of 30-pin SIMM memory is still considered as obsolete, not classic.
ahhh... I'm fond the days from when you could run whole applications in all of 4MiB -- GUIs included.