>>>The fact that the world has all this amazing hardware, and this ten year old laptop works just fine makes me wonder what kind of racket IT professionals are pulling here.
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>>>Why do you say "racket"?
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>>Its some kind of scam. 6GB of RAM for what?
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>>For no other reason to blow money and rare earth materials.
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>Of course there's the thing about GUI not only inherently requiring more memory, but more machine cycles to operate than a TUI. I recall back when the Macintosh was introduced and seeing the rather impressive-looking specs compared to typical PC-clone of the day. However when watching one run, it wasn't any faster for it - because it was burning many cycles for just the GUI. One wonders just how many cycles are being burned just to maintain display in a GUI.
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>And a GUI isn't the only thing that could be burning CPU cycles. A friend of mine used to play a videogame on his PC -- it was a 25MHz 486 system, and an external MIDI module he had stereo sound for music as well as sound effects. Tried same game no a 100MHz Pentium system w/o sound hardware. If I disabled the sound game would play OK. If I enabled sound utilizing PC speaker (essentially the program would "tickle" the port vibrate the speaker), I got garbled-sounding monophonic sound with stuttering video playback because the CPU could barely keep up. Adding soundcard took care of the stuttering problem, but there was noticeable difference in quality of the music (only way to get close was to get a rather expensive soundcard). I recall once installing a virtual MIDI module on a 300MHz system. Sound quality from MIDI playback was significantly improved over basic soundcard output -- however the system was brought down to its knees just playing some MIDI files (same MIDI file would play fine on an older 25MHz 80486 system with external MIDI module -- granted the module cost at a few hundred bucks).
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>Always interesting to watch the shocked look I get from people when demonstrating KolibriOS. Okay, so the GUI might not be so impressive, and the web browser is text only -- but it all loaded from a single 1.44MB diskette. Of course, if you remember the days of booting Macintosh or Amiga systems w/ GUI from 720K floppies (though w/o web browser).
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>The other piece of equipment that's amusing to show to some folks is the Raspberry Pi. Okay, so performance wise, it's kind of "ho-hum" -- but then it's hard to find something that you can get for $30 that can do the same sort of stuff. Personally I really like the Raspberry Pi -- mainly it offers the same sort of educational opportunity that those old 8-bit micros of the 1970s and early 1980s. It literally says "explore me" and challenges you to explore what you can do with it -- both in software as well as hardware..

While I was going through school we had one course in numeric methods. To run the assignments the choice was free vouchers for MTS (Michigan Terminal Systems) running on the campus IBM 360, or buy our own programmable calculators. I ended up buying an HP-29C and using that. A buddy bought a similar model from TI at about half the price. He crowed that his even included a "sub search" game; mine came with nada. This annoyed me so I wrote an improved version for the 29C, one that started random evasive maneuvers once depth charges got too close. It used all the resources of the calculator - 98 program steps, 16 direct and 14 indirect registers. It would process one "turn" in about 1 second on a chip running at something like 4KHz.

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago, when I was applying a .Net Framework security update to a server. Took something like 12 minutes, running 20-30% total CPU utilization on a 4 core Xeon processor (w/HT 8 virtual cores), each superscalar core running at 2.8GHz and capable of retiring multiple instructions per clock cycle.

The saying used to be "Andy Grove giveth, Bill Gates taketh away". No doubt there's an updated equivalent ;)