I guess I should have said "a lot of bloat by today's standards"...
My first experience with NT was NT 3.51 on a 32 MB machine. If I remember well, it didn't feel much slower than Windows 3.1. But finally having a PC operating system that didn't crash all the time really made development much more pleasant and productive.
A lot of affordable machines a few years old even had 4M. I remember my dad upgraded from 4 to 8 and from Win3.11 to Win95. The computer had maybe 1 or 2 years, hardly more. It was around 1500€ (well, it was 10000 FRF at the time) when bought, with a 14" screen.
32M was insane, probably out of reach of all but rich homes.
Only a few years later (1 or 2) a classmate told us he had a computer with 128M. That sounded so ridiculous that we thought he was a mythomaniac or something. Turns out his dad was able to get a powerful workstation from work, and the first time we visited him we saw that mythical beast, and our mind were blown.
And right now the private working set of my start menu process is 27M...
My first experience with NT was NT 3.51 on a 32 MB machine. If I remember well, it didn't feel much slower than Windows 3.1. But finally having a PC operating system that didn't crash all the time really made development much more pleasant and productive.