Many of the SPARCstations we had at work around that time had a 200MB hard drive. So yeah, it kind of was a lot.

So we stuck a build of X11 on our servers and mounted it over NFS. It started up a bit slower, but you generally only started an X session once a day (or for some people, once a month), so it was OK.

One summer many years ago I had to figure out how to build X11 on a VAX split across a couple of RA60 disk drives (~200MB). Learned a lot about filesystems, mounts and links (not to mention build environments), but considering it would be a couple of days to crash out each build and figure out what I'd done wrong it was less than fun. We got a couple of RA81s later (~450MB) which gave significantly more elbow room.

The first Mac I had was released in 1993 and had an 80 megabyte hard drive