It's full of optimisations to keep the code small, such as QBasic calling into C routines, as Jeff also wanted the source to all fit on one floppy disk.
For the complete opposite of this, go into the Storage settings on iOS and get a load of the bloated-ass apps there. Not counting the caches or data, mind you:
709MB (!): Gmail
319MB: YouTube
526MB: Instagram
381MB: Reddit
408MB: LinkedIn
529MB: the companion app for my car
463MB: PayPal
The list goes on and on. Most of these are either web content viewers, or they serve a single simple purpose.
It’s a healthy constraint but requires careful judgment. Making the installer fit on the floppy is easy if you just leave out a bunch of drivers that exist on the CD and USB installers. It takes discipline to make things fit by trimming bloated code in the kernel and removing vestigial features.
I was holding an external USB floppy drive the other day and the form factor, the tactile experience and the satisfying ejection mechanism got me fantasizing about a floppy jukebox with one song per disk. I’m sure it would be dope, but even for a regular 3 minute track you would have to seriously destroy your audio quality to fit into 1.44 MB. Those things are tiny! The best you could do would probably be some metadata that plays the song from elsewhere, but that’s lame and now you’re moving from being storage-constrained to leaving it 99% empty…
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It's full of optimisations to keep the code small, such as QBasic calling into C routines, as Jeff also wanted the source to all fit on one floppy disk.
709MB (!): Gmail 319MB: YouTube 526MB: Instagram 381MB: Reddit 408MB: LinkedIn 529MB: the companion app for my car 463MB: PayPal
The list goes on and on. Most of these are either web content viewers, or they serve a single simple purpose.
A passion project and you can't even trust yourself to write the front page.
Made me lose interest.
It’s a healthy constraint but requires careful judgment. Making the installer fit on the floppy is easy if you just leave out a bunch of drivers that exist on the CD and USB installers. It takes discipline to make things fit by trimming bloated code in the kernel and removing vestigial features.