20 years ago?
Or look a little further back. Like when the DoH was getting spanky new desktops with 16 Mb RAM in 4x4Mb SIMMs.
Obviously the users could easily get away with 8 (and I think we were being overly generous there), and obviously too, there was a lot of beer money to be made at around a hundred quid a pop to all those enthusiastic computer club members with their 2Mb PC clones.
Of course, being professionals, we would never have considered such an underhand operation.