Nah man, I aint Jewish, I just don't dig on swine, that's all.

There was a time when I had a TRS-80 (yes, I'm that old). It was a simple machine by today's standards and I'm not even remotely suggesting we would be better off with that technology than today's. But there were benefits to that type of machine. One of them was the fact that it had "only" 16 Kilobytes of RAM. In fact, my model was "beefier" than the standard which had only 4K.

Those of you under 25: Yes, there were machines before the IBM PC (Apple had one that comes to mind), machines that had less than 256K. Those of you over 25: Yes, I had a TRS-80 and yes, I liked it!

Why was having only 16K a good thing? Because it meant that programmers had to actually have some skill. When you think about it, computer programming is not a hard job. Basically, you decide what you want the computer to do and from a known set of instructions, pick which ones will make it do it. It's not rocket science. The trick is (or used to be) doing it efficiently.

Back in the days of yore, when real power users had machines with a whopping 64K, we didn't have a lot of RAM to waste. If we needed to perform a sort routine on 14K of data, we had 2K available to hold the code needed to perform the sort (unless we had a floppy disk drive -- which I didn't). While it's pretty easy to write a sort routine in 2,000 bytes or less, some tasks aren't so simple. But there were ways to do most things without resorting to just stuffing more RAM into our machines. (After all it cost something like $87,000/megabyte back then.)

Back then, a programmer wasn't someone who looked in a manual and read, "if you want your computer to do x, then type y". A programmer was a person who knew how to do things efficiently.

When is the last time you found a program that would fit in 16K? Today many DLLs don't fit in 16K (there are about 175 DLLs in the /OS2/DLL directory that are larger than 16K).

"So what," you ask, "today's programs do more than those old dinosaurs ever did." Well, that's true. Like I said, I would never argue that we were better off with those machines. I'm all for RAM that's a dollar a megabyte. But I'm not "all for" programmers who deliver a word processor that takes 4 of those megabytes just for the executable file.

Here's a partial directory listing of my hard drive:

Volume in drive G has no label.
The Volume Serial Number is E6E1:9014.
Directory of G:\wordpro

 7-29-96  12:00p   4166072        2636  WORDPRO.EXE
        1 file(s)    4166072 bytes used
                   589811200 bytes free

Please don't cry foul if you're a Lotus employee, I'm not singling out just Lotus or just the OS/2 version of Word Pro. Every large programming house that I can think of is turning out this particular breed of swine-ware. It seems, when it comes to word processors, that "get the job done" has been replaced with "get every job done" or at least "get the job done some time".

Can anyone tell me how we can justify word processors that are over 4 megabytes? What ever happened to efficient code? Sure, Word Pro and all the other word processors around these days can format text, perform minor spreadsheet functions, publish directly to the Internet, sort my correspondence and wash my car, but why should that affect the size of the executable file? Why can't those things be made modular so I don't have to load them just to write a simple memo? Those 4 megabytes don't include the DLL files that come with Word Pro (or any other word processor these days). Those DLLs take up another 19 megabytes.

I never had a word processor on my TRS-80 and didn't really get one until my first IBM PC-XT clone. I used a program called Professional Write. It fit on one 360K floppy and ran on my system that did not have a hard drive. It performed almost every function that I use in today's word processors. Again, I'm not saying that that these hogs aren't better than that old program. I realize they have a lot of added functionality that many people need or want. But 4 meg? Come on!

I also realize that a lot of the bloat in todays oink-ware comes from "window dressing" -- decorative graphics, cute sounds, the overhead of graphically oriented OS's.

But 4 meg? Come on!

As of this moment, I'm making a resolution: I refuse to take any software vendor seriously that delivers a product in a category which existed in the 80's and which has an executable over 1 megabyte. Fair warning Lotus, IBM, Microsoft, Corel, etc., I will discount you and consider your programmers ridiculous hacks if you can't get your acts together.

Let's get some real programmers back in the business and be done with all this pork-ware.

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