I was also surprised. I installed miktex which is around 200Mb and then it still automatically downloads and installs even the most basic packages i use from the internet.

Isn't latex from the 80's? I think my first disk that had more than 200Mb is from the early 90's? How did people use it back then? Also it is still horribly slow even on a core2 with 4gb ram and superfetch.