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Software bloat? This elevator needs an 8GB Core i5
(www.theregister.com)
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this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2026
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It's a lost art for sure. I wrote a graphic OS for an instrument my company uses in the field. I had 2 MB of RAM and 1 MB of storage to work with, and the latter had to include space for a data logger, so the code effectively had to reside in about a quarter of that.
It gave me a lot of respect for the original Mac OS. Graphic OS with 128 KB of RAM and 400 KB floppy for storage. The latter had to have room for the OS itself + apps + user documents. They did "cheat" somewhat by having a 64 KB ROM to help with the graphics library.
But the lengths they went to to squeeze every last bit of capability out of the hardware was legendary. For example, Wozniak wrote a floppy driver that varied the spin rate depending on which track was being read. He reasoned the outer tracks could hold more data thanks to the greater diameter if the spin were slowed down.
Programmers back in the day had to be super clever. I can't say much about programs but games used to be very restrictive and some devs managed to pull out incredible mechanics and graphics having barely any memory to work with. Today they'd release 150gb game that is no much better than a game they've released in 2008.
This always made me respect old school games.
A big part of games taking up more and more space is due to higher resolution assets. Creating installers only installing needed assets would drastically reduce the size for anyone not playing on extreme or whatever they call the maximum resolution.
But games do still tend to be among the archetypes of software, which hits bottlenecks that needs performance optimisations. You only have whatever hardware your end user has, you can't just buy a bigger server... well Google Stadia tried
I love how you can take an old game now and, assuming it's still playable, the cut scenes often look really bad compared to the regular game play, since they were pre-rendered at what would be considered low-res today. It used to be the other way around!
Also, the further back you go, the less the game industry was locked into a handful of game engines, which in some ways gave devs more creative freedom, though of course it was a lot of work to write the whole thing from scratch every time.