16KB ? You were lucky! (channeling my best Monty Python impression)
My first computer was a NASCOM-1 with 1KB available to the user, and didn't even have an assembler. You programmed it by entering hex op codes directly into memory! And we liked it that way!
Still, at least the NASCOM-1 had a keyboard, not like MIT's Altair 8800 of a few years prior where you only had binary toggle switches to setup the address and data bus to program each byte!
Except for the trade war when tariffs were slapped on DRAM imports from Japan because of dumping. The prices listed in the ads by Jameco and other companies in the back of Byte tell some interesting stories.
I read (IIRC in Andy Grove's autobiography, Only The Paranoid Survive), that this dumping was what made Intel switch from making memory to processors. The rest is history.
For a while we ran out of useful stuff to do with more RAM. We tried to fill the gap with micro-service development but the pain/ego ratio is not as good as having one big app chunking up the whole place. I assume the new AI stuff will pick up the slack and we'll soon have much more RAM hooked up to our NPUs than to our CPUs.
