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System Requirements
Very very little.
It's DOS. Its system requirements are very low.
It will be happy with less memory than Windows XP or even Windows 98.
It only needs, and can only use, 1 CPU core.
Power management is on, so it will run the processor slowly when idle. Even a PC with a stuck cooling fan may be enough. DOS uses only about 0.01% of the computing power of a 21st century computer.
A slow Pentium 1 computer is fast for DOS. A turn-of-the-century Pentium III will scream along. A slow Celeron, Atom, or "Pentium Dual Core" is plenty. A 1990s AMD Athlon is plenty.
The USB key has a single active partition and a SvarDOS master boot record. It should boot directly on any PC-compatible computer that supports legacy (BIOS) boot, including UEFI machines which have CSM support. Any laptop or desktop from about 2000 to 2015 or so should work. Machines new enough to have shipped with (or ready for) Windows 11 probably cannot boot DOS.
No version of DOS can boot on bare metal on a UEFI-only computer. DOS absolutely requires BIOS or BIOS-compatibility module and cannot work without it. You must also disable Secure Boot in in the firmware settings.
The key does not use your hard disk or SSD. Most firmware that can boot DOS can also emulate a hard disk for DOS using a USB flash drive. No additional DOS drivers are used or included.
In terms of memory: it's DOS. It needs about 1MB (not GB) of RAM and a VGA display. That's all. You will need a keyboard and optionally a pointing device that DOS can detect. Connect them before turning on the computer.
A 386 memory manager is installed and enabled, so that around 625 kB of DOS's total of 640 kB of memory is available.
So that means that you need a 386 or better. Since Intel introduced the 80386 in 1985, if you have a PC from the last 40 years this can be made to work.
You will need 1MB of RAM for this to work and it might give errors in so little. 32MB is a large amount.
It cannot see or use more than three-and-a-bit GB of RAM: roughly 3500 MB. That is 100x more than you need though.
A small low-end modern computer comes with 8192 MB.
Even a computer from 2000 with 128MB of RAM will be plenty.
It's designed to be written to a USB stick. The original v1.0 image will fit on a 256 MB key and uses well under a quarter of the space. The edition with WordStar etc. needs a 4 GB or bigger key.
You can run it under emulation on a non-x86 computer such as Arm-based machines, e.g. Apple Silicon Macs or a Raspberry Pi. It should still be usable, but will need more power as the computer will be doing 30-40x more work.