Whistlebrook’s Senior Development Lead, Anthony Reynolds, examines the rising demands on RAM over the years.

Recently I was reviewing specifications as part of purchasing some new company laptops and noted that our minimum amount of RAM sits at 16GB, with this increasing to 32GB for developer laptops. As little as 5 years ago, people were comfortably performing the same activities with 8GB of RAM, or even 4GB. And in my early years at Whistlebrook, 20 odd years ago 1GB of RAM was luxurious!

So what drives this seemingly constant increase in the “typical amount of RAM”?

Well, it seems to present itself as a sort of feedback loop if you will. Newer software applications become more complex as they can take advantage of the RAM available; Advances in RAM technology mean higher capacity and high speeds for the same cost, allowing these complex software applications to perform more effectively; Which in turn leads to newer software becoming more complex and maximising use of the greater amount of RAM now available; And so it continues. This is of course perpetuated further by users wanting bigger and better.

Take the humble web browser as an example, my first experience of surfing the web was asking Geeves to take me to the Arsenal F.C. website, to which I was presented with a fairly dull, poorly formatted page of text and nothing else. But today, my web browser has multiple pages open at the same time, all with slick responsive graphics and animations, coupled with high resolution images and videos.

This led me to recalling my first experiences of home computing in the late 80s and early 90s with my Amiga 500. It would run it’s Workbench 1.3 operating system from a floppy disk and I could play such classics as Lemmings; Sensible Soccer; Speed Ball or Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge. And all on 512KB of RAM! Or 0.000 488 GB if you prefer.

I have no doubt that in 5-10 years time I shall be reviewing laptop specifications, where 64GB of RAM is considered the minimum.