In the past releases of LATEX2e, the amount of memory LATEX requires has increased, but we are pleased to say that this trend has been reversed. We hope that future releases of LATEX will continue to get smaller.
For example, on this document, the December 1994 release used 52,622 words of memory, and the June 1995 release uses 51,216 words of memory, which is a 2.7% reduction.
We are currently experimenting with other ways of reducing the size of LATEX. For example, we are experimenting with an option to remove the picture and tabbing environments from the LATEX kernel, and to load them from a file the first time they are used. This should help LATEX to run on machines with limited memory. See autoload.txt for details.