01.Blogs :
RobMiles  
Programming, gadgets and life as a lecturer in a UK university.

Small is Beautiful

Last week we shipped the first version of our product. It is a data analysis and reporting tool for a customer of the university commercial arm.

I earned enough to buy a new Tablet PC and I'm well pleased. (this is the program I wrote the installer for last week).

The thing that surprised me was that the program, with a lot of functionality and hard work in it, would comfortably fit on a single floppy disk. All our efforts fitted into an install file which was only 1MByte in size. With the amount of work we had put in, I expected it to at least take an entire CD!

Of course our code is not the thing though. The program is a .NET application, and so makes use of a huge set of behaviours which come "for free" with the .NET Framework. It just got me thinking; if it wasn't for our love of pictures, sound and video (which don't always add much to an application anyway) we could all be using tiny programs.

posted on Wednesday, August 31, 2005 12:02 PM by RobMiles

# re: Small is Beautiful @ Thursday, September 01, 2005 12:25 PM

Ah, your comments harken me back to the "bad old days" of computers, when 64K wasn't just a good idea, it was the law. When I started (around 1980), before IBM joined the game, a good computer had 64KB of RAM, period! Wordstar was the word processor of choice, it ran on the CP/M operating system, and you saved your stuff to floppy disks that (if you were lucky) had 400K space. Man, those were the days. 8^)

Mr_I


 
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