Nope, software writers have definitely not gotten more elegant with time.

Not PC software at any rate. There are still some small, elegant embedded devices.

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Some of Microchip's PIC processors come with Flash memory for 256 instruction words and 16 bytes of RAM in a 6 pin housing with internal 4 MHz oscillator.

Quite nifty little blighters, actually.

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The most common embedded processor for years was the 8042 - even now most PCs have one as a cell in some I/O chip for the PS/2 mouse/keyboard support. Smallest is hard to say as you get into arguments over whether the thing in really a general purpose processor.

64k? I still have my Commodore PET with 8k of RAM!

As for the MacPRo - 2 TB of disk isn't that big a deal any more. Indeed they should have said 3 TB since you can buy 750GB drives at any decent computer store and they have room for four drives. And 16GB is conservative - 4 MB FB-DIMMs aren't far off and will let them reach 32 GB of RAM.

I'm a little disappointed in that the OS to fully support it won't be out until next year, and the specs don't really seem that far beyond, say, a Dell Workstation 490. But then Microsoft Windows x64 isn't really usable yet either so those two are in the same boat.

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The PIC I know about, but haven't done anything with.

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