What comes to my mind, regarding filesytem space...
When I built my first linux kernel, I had a HUGE disk on my computer, it was a 30MB esdi/RLL thing mounted on a extension card on the PC bus, prior to such modern things like ATA disks...

My distro was Slackware, hand-installed from floppy disks. On the same disk (mind you, the disk was so large I had several partitions on it...) I also had windows 3.1, Autocad (must have been 8.xx?) and several really topnotch games (Ultima Underworld etc...)

And now I have a partition 16*size, I even dont know how much faster, just laying there empty