What’s mind boggling is the change in relative demand. Back in the 1990s, an IRC or AIM client was a little background app that took a tiny fraction even of a 64MB of RAM computer. But Slack takes a larger share of an 8GB if RAM computer.

Slack is an electron app which is why it needs GBs to run. Native apps can run in a fraction of that. But the faster time to market is likely most bloated implementation.

That's garbage collection for you. Typical GC programs want all the memory there is, just to be able to sweep less often.

From my experiments with the JVM that is not really true. Keeping memory usage below 1GB is pretty easy. It's only getting tricky when you want to go below 200MB. You'll have to deal with the overhead the JVM introduces. As a result I often just use lua for really simple programs and I am rewarded by creating programs that use less than 2MB of RAM.

Which Lua kind/runtime you're using that give you such frugal programs? I'm intrigued (pun with your name intended).

Or good old Minecraft with 300 mods. It takes 20 minutes to start and even if you run the server embedded within the Minecraft client it will take 6GB at a minimum. Well, RAM is cheap so I just bought 32GB for $110 out of necessity but I still keep paying attention to how much RAM my programs need and avoid wasting it needlessly (using 4.6GB out of 32GB right now).

There were functional spreadsheets that ran on a Apple ][ with 48k of RAM. Not to mention schematic capture and PCB layout programs that would run 'fine' on a 486 with 4 MB of RAM.

So yeah it's disheartening to see programs with the same functionality of an old 16 bit 0x86 program using hundreds of MB's of RAM.

I wonder how much of this is simply due to increasing expectations on interface and portability. Icons, borders, and fonts were tiny in the 90s and looked tiny. Programs ran for particular platforms and were often coded in the native platform's APIs and linked to specific binaries of a specific OS version. Now with expectations of high res iconogrophay, detailed and smooth fonts, as well as the expectation that an OS update shouldn't effect any of my apps - we inherently have bigger programs. The alternative approach could be taken, but it wouldn't be viewed as a mark of quality.

Games like Destiny weighs in at >100GB with it's latest updates due to map and image needs, and the slack client runs smoothly across 5 Operating systems.

"High-res" icons are still quite tiny. Expectations have definitely grown wrt. the complexity of text rendering: things like Unicode multi-language support, emojis and high-quality typography are taken for granted nowadays, and even something as simple as that would have required fairly high-end hardware back in the early-to-mid 1990s.

Also accessibility - I dont think people really cared about screen readers, high contrast rendering or configurable system wide font size back then.