If you need to explain this too less geeky friends then
telling them that this amount of storage is less than a single letter on a modern display. Which on a 32bit display at 12x12 you would be on 576 bytes (8 bits) and this is compared to a 320 11 bit word (320x11/8=440) 440 bytes.
This makes chess on a 1k zx81 including display seem like bloat-ware now :).
Nowadays we have more storage on the keyboard controller chips, heck the older ones during the 90's had 4 KB storage, so almost 10x more ROM alone to work with - for a keyboard.
Given that Sprite managed to get Linux booting on a hard disks processor [0], I'm increasingly aware that the embedded device we use are overpowered. Makes for some interesitng hacking though, I bet you could run a webserver on my washing machine.
This makes chess on a 1k zx81 including display seem like bloat-ware now :).
Nowadays we have more storage on the keyboard controller chips, heck the older ones during the 90's had 4 KB storage, so almost 10x more ROM alone to work with - for a keyboard.