I managed to compile some fairly large - for BeOS - programmes on a PPC box with 24MB RAM - 8MB soldered and 16MB added. It now has 136MB, the max it can take, which is transformative for performance. As is an SSD!
32MB was a recommendation rather than required, as we see up-thread with that 16MB boot.
That’s fun to see people caring about how much the system eat while in same time they request apps that are eating megabytes of memory by dozens, starting by browsers…
Replying to an almost 3 years old post… anyway…
I ran BeOS R5 PE on an AMD-K5-100 MHz, 16 MB of RAM. with a Trident 9440 PCI video card that was not VESA 2.0 compatible, thus… only having black and white graphics on BeOS… UNTIL… I’ve installed Scitech’s UniVBE TSR in DOS, and then called loadbeos.com… glorious R5 PE in 16 bits colors!!!
(sorry if this was covered already… still reading old posts).
Edit: this was in late 2000. That’s how I got hooked into BeOS. Gogo-no-coda kicking the crap out of any mp3 cli encode I had for DOS? YES, PLEASE! 