But orders of magnitude more bloat? I had full multitasking in the late 80's, on an Amiga 500 with 512K of RAM. There was no memory protection, but there was a GUI.
I remember running Linux (kernel 1.0 and earlier) with X11, in 8 megs of RAM or less, back on an old 486. I could compile kernels. Running emacs was a bit painful, however.
What we have today is more bloated than I could have possibly imagined 20 years ago...
Compiler bloat is definitely an issue. There has been a lot of work that goes into intermediate representations and all sorts of optimizations that results in very diminishing or no returns for many use cases.
Runtime bloat is a much bigger issue. You have multi-stage runtimes that have an interpreter, a bytecode compiler, and a JIT. Huge amounts of RAM use and very CPU intensive. This makes sense for webGL games, but totally pointless for the common case of running tracking adware on websites whose only real content is a page or two of text.
The main problem are applications with poorly written event loops and memory leaks. That is why modern computing feels bloated. Slightly better compiler output or another 5% improvement in JS runtimes cannot solve this problem. It is a type of induced demand - the more RAM and CPU you have, the more accessible computer programming becomes to people who have very little idea of what they are doing and how to do it properly.
I remember running Linux (kernel 1.0 and earlier) with X11, in 8 megs of RAM or less, back on an old 486. I could compile kernels. Running emacs was a bit painful, however.
What we have today is more bloated than I could have possibly imagined 20 years ago...