In context, around 1980 we bought 1.5MB of memory (core, real core, hand threaded core) for our Burroughs mainframe, we paid more than $1M (1980s) dollars for it. With 3MB our 1MHz mainframe supported 40 users.

You make do with the memory and cycles available, things get easier as the resources get less tight, it's easy to use things like garbage collection rather than doing the hard yards and managing memory yourself, or to break branch prediction by using virtual objects