Mid 1996...
I bought a 386DX40 with 4Mb Ram in 1992. Three years later it was not good enough. I convinced myself that it was because the programs were better.
I bought a 486DX2 with 8Mb Ram, and in 1996 it isn't good enough. Some programs crawled. They weren't even fancy. They were basically slideshows. They were a group of similar programs. Maybe it was an exception?
Then I found a demo of Putt Putt Saves the Zoo. When I installed it and saw it took about 30Mb of hard disk space, I thought it must be the full program. Beaut!
But when I tried to run it I was informed that it required Windows. I also needed to install something called WIN32S. Then I was told that my 8Mb RAM might not be enough unless I got rid of Smartdrive... And... my graphics card was not really good enough for the program to run smoothly.
Finally, there it was, just a short demo. Over 30Mb for that! I still wasn't convinced of anything sinister - it was a new program after all, and maybe I'd missed something.
A few days later I came across Windows demos of two Putt Putt programs. I already had the DOS demos. They take about 2Mb of hard drive space each and run well on a 386SX with 2Mb RAM.
These versions take over 8Mb of hard drive space each and will not run properly in less than 8Mb RAM. Better programs? No, exactly the same, except that they require Windows, a lot more space, and a lot more RAM. I suppose the Windows 95 versions will take at least 16Mb of drive space and 16Mb RAM!? Where will it end?