Sure, you can argue it wasn't that long ago, but that totally ignores the rest of the point:

> And, you could read on those computers just fine.

The problem is not that the New York Times website is using too much memory for the average system. The problem is that it is using several orders of magnitude more memory to run ad-related JS in the background than it needs for the user-desired functionalitty.

Isn't the user-desired functionality that the New York Times make enough money to continue investigating and publishing news? Ads are simply a means to an end.

No. The user doesn't desire journalism to be dependent on ad revenue.

It isn't the user's responsibility to provide a better solution. Not having a solution doesn't make the problem disappear.

A few weeks ago, out of Coranavirus-induced boredom, I decided to run Apple Rhapsody in VMWare, which can be thought of as a very early version of OS X.

At first, I couldn't get it to boot—it kept kernel panicking, and I couldn't figure out why. After a bit of Googling, I found the problem—I'd given the VM too much memory. Rhapsody DP2 will not boot if it has access to more than 192 MB of RAM. I assume Apple figured that no one would ever need that much.

Rhapsody came out in 1998. Not really that long ago.

> 1998 [...] Not really that long ago

The Apple II came out in 1977, 43 years ago.

1998 therefore roughly marks the halfway point between the dawn of mainstream personal computers and the present day. I dare say 1998 was a very long time ago, in PC years.

That's fair, but respectfully, it really wasn't my point.

"There was a time—recent enough that it was within most of our lifetimes—when most computers had less than 200 MB of RAM total. You could read on those computers just fine."

On a side note it just shows poor programming on Apple’s part . I mean they didn’t built it to last , at that point Moore law was very much in force , even few years ahead had they projected they would have clearly seen that 192 mb was going to be too less.

Most ofthe gnu utils still work perfectly fine many of them were written in late 70’s and 80’s , apple itself ships , in the latest OSX , posix utilities from late 80’s versions for GPL reasons.

Perhaps it is not fair comparison , utilities are not the same as an OS . unix or Linux from the same era may not work anymore as well.

I don't think it's a fair comparison. :)

In addition to being an entire OS as you mentioned, Rhapsody was a "developer preview". The final version was called "Mac OS X Server 1.0". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Server_1.0

>I decided to run Apple Rhapsody in VMWare, which can be thought of as a very early version of OS X.

Rhapsody was more of a quick and dirty port of NeXTSTEP to Mac hardware than a version of OS X.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP

>Rhapsody came out in 1998.

NeXTSTEP is from the late 80's.

> NeXTSTEP is from the late 80's

The version he tested was from 1998. Similar to how Windows NT came out in 1993, but the current version (Windows 10) has a few added capabilities since.

The version he tested was not a version of MacOS.

MacOS addressed up to 96 Gigs of RAM initially, now up to 128 Gigs of RAM.