Comment by tabtab
7 years ago
Re: It wasn't even wrong. There wasn't a need for that much memory on a desktop then.
What more RAM does is allow programmers to "be lazy": slap libraries together and use powerful but resource-hungry abstractions rather than hand-tune details.
We have a similar pattern today with JavaScript and CSS layering in web pages, making them slow and bloated.
It's increasing hardware usage in order to reduce greyware (human programmer) usage. Whether such is "smart" or economical makes for an interesting debate. It appears consumers prefer cheaper software over cheaper hardware for some reason. Software developers who are fastidious over hardware resource usage (RAM & CPU) are not sufficiently rewarded. The group that slaps existing API's together to get their product out quick and cheap seem to come out ahead.
I remember how MS-Office for DOS shipped on 7 floppy disks. I kept wondering why people tolerate loading 7 floppies. It's because the alternatives of the time were harder to use or cost more.
> I remember how MS-Office for DOS shipped on 7 floppy disks.
You must be remembering something else because there were no DOS versions of Office.
It could have been Excel plus Word and maybe some other utilities that I don't remember. It was "Office-like".
There was no version of Excel for DOS either. It started on the Mac, then went straight to Windows. IIRC the first couple of versions even came bundled with the Windows runtime.
1 reply →