And RAM was so tight, especially if you had to load network drivers. Somewhere around here I still have a copy of Quarterdeck QEMM, which would allow you to optimize the memory you had, load drivers into upper memory, and even allow you to map RAM into unused areas of your bios, so you could actually get a bit over 700KB ram available, even with mouse, network, and other device drivers available.
Looking back, it’s hard to believe that there were versions of word processors and spreadsheets that would run in less than 1MB ram, and could be stored on 360KB disk drives!
Mark
“Looking back, it’s hard to believe that there were versions of word processors and spreadsheets that would run in less than 1MB ram, and could be stored on 360KB disk drives!”
Yeah, but that is how the best programmers were made, because they had to make sure every single line of code was as efficient as possible. Nowadays they have the luxury of being able to write bloated code because the computers are so fast with so much memory that it doesn’t affect performance that much.