I am routinely using a Macintosh SE/30 with 16Mb of RAM and a 250Mb hard disk; I write documents with Microsoft Word 5.1a (which can even be read by Office up to the 2000 version) or spreadsheets with Excel 4. I can even play a few decent games, and connect to the internet to check email or transfer files from my PC. I have A/UX installed on the same machine, with a full complement of development tools, and it also runs native Macintosh applications. This machine can boot its OS FROM A FLOPPY! The whole System 6.0.8 lives on a floppy disk! THAT was a feat.
Right on
I need to get my SE/30 recapped...
The mac is much less efficient than the Amiga. If you're impressed by that, remember that an A1200 can usefully write letters and stuff using Final Writer using just a couple of MB of RAM.
If you like fast, efficient OSes, then you should love AmigaOS!
I've of course got no bad words for the Amiga OS, and classic Mac OS has its own issues, but I'll just note that 68k Mac software is perfectly capable of doing plenty in a couple MB as well. It didn't really start suffering from bloat until the later PowerPC years...
Just because a 20 year old Mac suits your needs doesn't make everyone on the bleeding edge "wrong" 
Those old machines boot the OS off a floppy - the OS from those days is far, far different than a modern OS.
Use what you enjoy, I say. There's always going to be the types that scream from the rooftops "WELL IF I CAN'T DO IT ON MY PDP-8 IT ISN'T WORTH DOING AND IT IS NOT REAL COMPUTING!11!!1!1!1"
Simple fact is, when most of us got into computers, you had to be a computer enthusiast. You *had* to have technical skills. These days, modern machines are just an appliance to most people.
You know what, I'm going to go ahead and be "that guy" here, and say that there really
is nothing that can't be done in some form on a reasonably powerful 68k Mac or Amiga that is really vitally worth doing on a computer at all. Movies, sure, or playback of recorded music (as opposed to synthesized music,) but those can be done perfectly satisfactorily on dedicated devices (VCRs, CD players) anyway.
And the "appliance" view of computing, blindly treating the computer as a magic black-box that makes stuff happen when you press buttons but that can never be understood by mere mortals, is half the reason modern computing is in such a mess to begin with.
One thing to consider is that as you go from 16 bit to 32 bit to 64 bit software, the smallest that any information can be is 16 bit, 32 bit and 64 bit respectively. Even if you optimized it 100% the same software will always end up needing more ram and the executable will always be larger as you up the bits.
That's not true at all. Modern processors are perfectly capable of handling things at the byte level, and some architectures even support bit-field instructions. Some architectures do have a fixed instruction size, so code size can't always be reduced by much, but bloating of RAM usage for data is purely down to programmer laziness.
But I agree there is a lot of bloat, but no all is due to inefficient code Some of it is due to feature creep: adding more and more features which are less and less useful.
Its interesting that this also extends to even things like icons: do we really need 32 bit photo-realistic icons that take up more ram, more cpu cycles? I actually enjoy using Macos 7 for its simplicity. I also now have a 8 color Workbench with the stock Commodore icons.
And do we need animations of a page curling and turning when reading a document? Well actually Apple seems to now think the answer is "no", with Jon Ives heavily involved in the new Mac interface design, and he is dead against "photo-realism".
Indeed. Modern software is increasingly buried under a mountain of glitz...Windows 7 won't even let you roll back to the simple 95 look anymore.
Music is crap now because kids think video game noises from a sega are music nowadays and strippers = talent. Kids don't have a frame of reference to know talent vs crap.
Right on. As we all know,
men in flower costumes, furry drag, and
spangly vest/pants combos = talent.
