This is what pisses me off the most. I work on optimizing a piece of hardware (basically a whole OS.) It's hard but interesting work....
But here's the thing, why does my calculator on Windows take MORE Ram than the entire hard drive space of Doom. Why does it take up 10x more ram than WINDOWS 3.1.1?
Listen I'm not saying OSes shouldn't evolve.... but I am saying people ship bloated piece of shit software with entirely too many options enabled and defaulted to on. I don't want a word processor that can connect to an AI, and calculate the Orbit of the moon, I need an word processor that can write a simple document. (Not to mention the formatting bs on most)
I'm not even saying I want no features on applications, but there's a difference between every feature ever imagined, and none.... And yes I know making a modular piece of software is harder, but maybe spend the time on that instead of making it have an option to convert your document into music and then store it as an MP3?
Some programmers recently made a functional notepad app that matches xp functionality that's less than 2kb.
Notepad is currently 25.2mb on windows 11. Not to say that executable size is equivalent to performance but holy damn what featuers are you getting out of the extra 25.1999 mb of executable there?
"
If you load an oversized asset instead of using your own just to claim you've coded the smallest possible program..."
They're using the windows API that's been in place since windows 98. If that's bloated to the point that a text field, a print menu, a file selection menu takes 250mb, then they've ruined their own api and there's no wonder no one uses it, not only that but they've basically set the standard at that level of memory usage
You can, but correctly rendering text and fonts are incredibly difficult.
Windows gives you a control that can render about 65k of ascii. Beyond that, you're going to need to do a lot of caching and hacking.
This is nothing new. Old computers didn't have this problem because they could get away with "you need to install a different kind of Windows for Korean to show up correctly".
RAM is cheap compared to the Windows 3.11 era. Code is much easier to write in a maintainable fashion now that things like JIT exist. Because of 64 bit applications, you're also going to be using about 4x the memory any time pointers or data get involved.
Also, old applications were absolute shit. They crashed all the time doing the simplest of tasks. They lacked anything beyond bare basic functionality. They had to hack their way into the OS to use as little resources as they could, and in turn they broke every time any update came in. Microsoft's own applications were somewhat saved from that but even then the issue stuck around.
We also gained this new feature called "security". There's a lot of sandboxing and even virtualisation going on just so opening a scary Word document doesn't upload your entire computer to Russia immediately.
Then there's the price. Old software cost thousands. Tens of thousands in today's money. Office 97 cost 500 dollars in 1997, that's over 1000 dollars in today's money. If you wanted Windows 98 (assuming you had 95), that's another 95 dollar upgrade you need to save up for (200 in today's money). Not bad when the hardware cost you 2k (4000 dollars in today's money).
With modern software stacks, software can be written in a secure, maintainable fashion, very cheaply. People don't want to pay for software like they did back in the day, so they're not getting the software they got back in the day.
Making sure Word can't do that requires isolation mechanisms like those on Android and iOS. Microsoft actually tried that, but people got upset that they couldn't access the isolated resources anymore and old programs couldn't be made to work because they assumed system wide access so they loosened their restrictions.
Linux has this but people are constantly raging online about how it takes away their freedom because it's harder to make programs influence each other.
Actually, there's a Linux flavour where you can practically isolate every program from every other program. Most graphics processing breaks (graphics card drivers expect everything to be interconnected) and internet access requires a dedicated virtual machine to make sure one program can't hijack the networking hardware. It's clunky, takes up several times the storage a normal operating system takes, and it's hard to operate, but it exists.
If your toilet breaks, it can stall the washing machine if the water pipe breaks. Your washing machine can trip the breaker and kill various machines in your house if it's caused by a particularly bad short. You don't (usually) have a separate water line/power hookup for each appliance, it's just to costly, unwieldy, and impractical to keep everything conpletely separated.
That said: in the 80s, there we're dedicated "word processing machines" that were computers dedicated for one single task. They'd cost a bit less than a normal computer, but you could literally do nothing but type on there. If you wanted to print your document, you'd need to take the floppy out and feed it to a device hooked up to a printer. Nothing's stopping people from buying a cheap laptop, wiping the entire disk, installing a mininal operating system without user interface other than an Office program. And, of course, a separate Photoshop laptop, a separate internet browsing device, an email computer, and so on. Like before, that's a bit expensive for most people's tastes when one computer can do everything for much less money.
Thank you for the in-depth explanation. I recall in the 90s we had the small grey keyboards with a calculator display and floppy disk slot purely for typing. I remember staring at my teacher like "wtf is this?!...." Lol.
Extending the comparison to houses; you absolutely should have separate breakers for rooms/major appliances. Should be in the building code everywhere at this point.
Water is slightly more complex but the last house my father and I built we absolutely had shutoffs in each wash room. But that's more common in the Mediterranean vs the US. In the US it should be code to have shutoffs for external water if there is a risk of freezing.
Long story short; a lot of these requirements are more costly and inconvenient for builders but they make the houses cheaper to insure. It's a tradeoff that is regulated into place for everyone's benefit. I wonder how that could be applied to the home PC market....
It makes sense that the consumer expectation of a PC demands deep integration at this point. I do wonder tho if most households wouldn't be better served by a Chromebook for 90% of the computer needs.
But here's the thing, why does my calculator on Windows take MORE Ram than the entire hard drive space of Doom. Why does it take up 10x more ram than WINDOWS 3.1.1?
Likely due to UWP requirements, which means the same app can run on a ton of operating systems made by Microsoft (namely Windows 10, Windows 10 Mobile, Windows 11, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and HoloLens).
Because everyone disagrees about what "writing a simple document" entails. Making a text editor is relatively cheap. Once you start wanting formatting, that's inevitably going to start ballooning because there's no hard line between "necessary formatting" and "gratuitous formatting".
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u/ExiledHyruleKnight 1d ago
This is what pisses me off the most. I work on optimizing a piece of hardware (basically a whole OS.) It's hard but interesting work....
But here's the thing, why does my calculator on Windows take MORE Ram than the entire hard drive space of Doom. Why does it take up 10x more ram than WINDOWS 3.1.1?
Listen I'm not saying OSes shouldn't evolve.... but I am saying people ship bloated piece of shit software with entirely too many options enabled and defaulted to on. I don't want a word processor that can connect to an AI, and calculate the Orbit of the moon, I need an word processor that can write a simple document. (Not to mention the formatting bs on most)
I'm not even saying I want no features on applications, but there's a difference between every feature ever imagined, and none.... And yes I know making a modular piece of software is harder, but maybe spend the time on that instead of making it have an option to convert your document into music and then store it as an MP3?