The value of old software?

[tezza]

What doesn't seem to bother anyone, however, is how large even simple programs have become.

Yes, I've been building up a software library for my old machines. It's amazing what people squeezed into 8k. ...or even 4k! My Vic 20 has a very passable version of pacman in just 4k!! Egads!

Tez

 

[linuxlove]

my reasoning on this is, programs are getting larger simply because hard drives are getting larger too plus the fact the gigabytes of memory is the standard (anything less than 1GB and people will be staring at you like "what is that obsolete THING you have?").

 

[Unknown_K]

While it's true that old assembly-based software could be made compact and fast, the problem was that it was the very devil to keep it up to date with hardware and operating system advances.

Moving my assembly code from 8 to 16 to 32 bits was almost painful. By comparison, the C code was mostly simply a recompilation. I suspect that interpreted BASIC probably doesn't have to be changed at all.

What doesn't seem to bother anyone, however, is how large even simple programs have become.

Probably because instead of coding everything these days people use DLL libraries for ready made functions and those tend to be bloated multi function tools. Its like having to lug around a complete 10,000 piece craftsman kit just because you needed a screwdriver and a wrench for a project.

This allows people to concentrate on their core code and just re-use eveything else that exists for UI, network, serial , video etc. You can make apps pretty fast that way but it gets bloated.

Back in the later 90's I used to program control setups for running in house tests using a program called Testpoint by CEC corp. The finished self installing apps would fit on a single floppy drive and work on 16/32 bit systems with little memory so I could use pretty much any old rig to run them. I am sure that if I used Visual basic along with the Computerboards DLL library it would have ended up in the many MB's of space and needed a much faster computer with much more RAM.

 

[Chuck(G)]

Part of the attraction of DLLs was supposed to be that code could be shared by simultaneously executing applications (shared libraries). So a program looking for a facility could dynamically link to an already-loaded library or cause one to be loaded and possibly avoid loading a duplicate copy of the required code.

Other than the Windows API primitives and perhaps the MS C runtime libraries, I wonder how much DLL code is shared by applications nowadays. Perhaps it would have been better if statically-linked libraries were used.

Having the entire Craftsman toolkit around might not even be so bad if other applications didn't also require the entire Snap-On toolkit and the entire K-D toolkit...