[ubuntu-uk] memory lane, was: Please can someone look at this and try to help

[norman]

What a collection of wonderful memories. One of the many things I have
puzzled over is the way the size of software has increased over the
years. For example, I used to use Wordstar 1.8 which did all the basic
things one needed to produce documents very similar to the present day
office programmes. Yet, if my memory is correct, the application
excluding, the spellchecker, occupied about 14KB of space on the 5.25in
floppie. I recall an article published in PCW in 1993, I think, which
described the all singing all dancing Wordstar on the Osborne
transportable computer. This article described how to change four of the
print commands which were redundant when using  a dot matrix printer to
commands of use. The procedure involved delving into the code using a
debugger, making the changes to the code and then saving back to the
floppie. The formula for the saving involved a satement of the size of
the space to be reserved and that was 14 KB. 

I had a theory that as RAM became cheaper and cheaper programmers became
lazier and lazier and did not need to strive to be economical with their
code.

Norman