It's amazing how things change. In the old days (DOS era, insofar as PCs are concerned) people used to go for RAM Doublers, which was useful for people with 256Kb RAM or less[1]. And others went for RAMdisks (useful for working off of floppies only, where one SS/DD (40 track) 5.25" one might be the "system" disk (360kb, wasn't that?), and you might have swapped it out in order to put in a program disk unless you had a B: drive as well.
I evenheard of someone using a RAM Doubler
and a RAMDisk. I'm not sure what they ended up with, except a load of overhead lost in both capacity and performance.
(Actually, if the RAM-doubling involved compression, maybe they ended up with more effective working space, but slower at it. But if you're just running at the speed of your typing it might not have been noticeable.)
Erm, sorry, gone all nostalgic. Ignore me.
I was
also mentioning the amount of memory (probably) needed, but now I've been ninjaed on that issue, so I'll snippety snip that out again.
[1] The first 'proper'[2] PC I used was less than that. And less than 10Mb HDD. Not sure it was fully 100% IBM-PC compatible, but did well, and had good (albeit monochrome) graphics with its Hercules graphics card and high end (albeit green) monitor.
[2] Though I first used a DOS-alike on a BBC/Torch Graduate combo. (No, not ADFS, which was a separate boot disk and called GDFS, anyway.)