No, this isn’t a Small Is Beautiful
Let me begin with an anecdote.
Back in the early 1980s I worked for a UNIX shop as a kernel programmer. I wrote many device drivers for many platforms. It was a true “How I fought with hardware and Software but kep my sanity” stage of life and was very interesting. One of the ‘toys’ was an early VAX-780 with an early version of BSD 4.x. No, really, we had TCP in 4.1c before 4.2. But the hardware or the VAX and the PDP-11, like other hardware I’d worked on, was liited by today’s standards. We had a whopping 4 Megabytes of memory in the PDP-11/44 that the company ran on. It supported 40 users doing development, building compilers and cross compiling for other platforms. We shifted across to the VAX as it proved its stability and its performance improved as Bill Joy played software leap-frog with Dave Cutler - but that’s another story.