I suppose in principle the RPi Pico could self-host its own OS and devel environment. 520 KB of RAM in the old days was plenty to fit an OS and compiler.
With two cheap PSRAM chips and a bit of trickery, you can upgrade that to 32(.5) MB, which is certainly enough to run a small OS.
In principle you can add even more memory with bank switching, but 32 MB is the limit for a flat address space.
Correct. My dad was unamused when he bought me an Amiga, and it didn’t have enough RAM to load the advertised features of AmigaBASIC and the speech synthesizer at the same time.
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With two cheap PSRAM chips and a bit of trickery, you can upgrade that to 32(.5) MB, which is certainly enough to run a small OS.
In principle you can add even more memory with bank switching, but 32 MB is the limit for a flat address space.
Window 95 ran on 8mb of ram.
The first Amigas had 512k of ram. Both had much less processing power.
With 32mb you could probably run some kind of Linux.
Yep, there is a project tiny386, Win95 on ESP32, $1.85 chip.
https://github.com/hchunhui/tiny386/tree/master https://www.cnx-software.com/2025/11/14/windows-95-made-to-r...
Even better, 8MiB was recommended for Windows 95 but it minimally required just 4.
Well, the first Amigas had only 256KB of RAM. Doubling that to 512KB (via a memory expansion card) was a luxury!
Correct. My dad was unamused when he bought me an Amiga, and it didn’t have enough RAM to load the advertised features of AmigaBASIC and the speech synthesizer at the same time.
When I first ran linux you could boot it off of a 1.2mb floppy. The 486 I ran it on had 4mb of ram at the time, later upgraded to 16mb.