Didn’t the Apollo guidance computer, which took people to the moon, have 4K of RAM? Today, 1 million times that barely runs the OS and a few Chrome tabs.
The computer had 2048 words of erasable magnetic-core memory and 36,864 words of read-only core rope memory. Both had cycle times of 11.72 microseconds. The memory word length was 16 bits: 15 bits of data and one odd-parity bit. The CPU-internal 16-bit word format was 14 bits of data, one overflow bit, and one sign bit (ones' complement representation). [1]
Russians ran computers with ferrite-plate RAM of similar size on submarines well into 90s or maybe even 00s. Still using software written for them on Kilo submarines in some sort of VMs.
