at the time of its release, many users noticed that performance suffered as a result of upgrading from system 6 to system 7, though newer hardware soon made up for the speed difference. another problem was system 7's large "memory footprint": system 6 could boot the system from a single 800k floppy disk and took up about of ram, whereas system 7 used well over a megabyte. it was some time before the average mac shipped with enough ram built in for system 7 to be truly comfortable. system 7 was the first system release that could no longer be usefully run on floppy-only systems. although most macintosh models sold at the time included a hard disk as standard equipment, owners of older models were required to upgrade by buying either a new mac or external scsi hard disk drive if they wished to run system 7.