I, too, miss the good old days of splitting bytes into nibbles. Sometimes I program a microcontroller just to feel the walls moving in.
Software today is designed the way it is because developer time matters more than hardware specs. Getting the software to run and onto market is much more important than memory footprint. Very few companies worry about hiring an assembly programmer to quench out 10% performance. They don't even use C/C++ because it's that irrelevant. Before those programmers even finish the market has moved on and the product is obsolete.
People want the RAM because it is cheap and they can put it to good use for their data mining, video editing, virtual machines or whatever.
Software today is designed the way it is because developer time matters more than hardware specs. Getting the software to run and onto market is much more important than memory footprint. Very few companies worry about hiring an assembly programmer to quench out 10% performance. They don't even use C/C++ because it's that irrelevant. Before those programmers even finish the market has moved on and the product is obsolete.
People want the RAM because it is cheap and they can put it to good use for their data mining, video editing, virtual machines or whatever.