[wila]

> It did not seem to affect home computers like the Apple ][, Commodore 64, and such.

Your software most likely did not ran off a hard disk. So it was slow to load anyways.. and after that it ran within the memory it had. One program at a time, no memory swapping.

> I don't think it affected PC compatible computers running DOS.

Umm.. I remember being mesmerized by disk defrag programs. There was also TSR programs and other ways to run more as one program at a time.

[PaulHoule]

Circa 1987 I switched from a TRS-80 Color Computer 3 which had two floppy drives to a 286-based IBM AT clone with an HDD that almost exclusively ran MS-DOS or DR-DOS.

In general though if you have more state there is more possibility that the state goes bad (e.g. malware counts as "bad state", as does a configuration database growing without bound, or something like the XP-era updating mechanism in Windows that was O(N^2) in terms of the number of previous updates)

I could swear I didn't notice this rot with that 286 machine, the 486 machine I replaced it on that ran Linux, the Sun 3 and Sun SPARC workstations at my undergrad school, AIX workstations at grad school, etc. (There was the SGI machine that always struggled to get out of its own way at anything that a professor bought, never bothered to set a route password, never got anything done with it, but left it plugged into the Ethernet and power)

Once we got into modern Linux distributions like Fedora that had Gnome or KDE I definitely had this problem though.

[fouc]

none of the other comments seem to mention memory swapping. this is the correct answer