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This is true, but if you gave emacs the 8 megabytes it wanted it ran great even at scale (lots of buffers into lots of giant open files) in my experience.

OTOH (also in my experience), Atom is somewhat Eclipse-esque (though admittedly not nearly as bad as Eclipse) in that the performance problems it has at scale cannot really be solved by throwing more hardware at it... whether you are on a relatively low-end laptop or a high end pro workstation with a 3ghz CPU and dozens of gigabytes of memory, if you open just a few big (>2 megabyte) files in Atom you're pretty hosed.

"Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping"--Seems quaint now, doesn't it?

A little, but at least it could open an 8mb file, not to mention a 2mb file...

Thirty years ago 1MB of RAM was $800+ ...I would have complained too.

Of course, that was the reasoning behind it. RAM was expensive and allocating all the RAM on an Unix box to one process was 'unpopular'. Especially when there were more than one time-shared user on the machine.