One of these days, you'll look at 850 MB of RAM like I used to see 4K of RAM: Amazed at how small it was, and how much we have today. My first computer saved d

One of these days, you'll look at 850 MB of RAM like I used to see 4K of RAM: Amazed at how small it was, and how much we have today. My first computer saved data to a cassette tape; today, terabyte hard drives are nearly give-away prizes in cereal boxes (yeah, I know they don't do that anymore, either). We have machines in our pockets which are arguably (in some ways) more powerful than the machines only government-funded agencies and such could afford when I was a kid (and they took up entire rooms). I hope I live long enough to think of 850 MB as a small amount of memory (and 8-cores at 4 GHz each a slow machine; actually, there are some multi-cpu server mobos I'd love to have as a desktop, but I can't afford it - yet). Honestly, I'm amazed that we do have enough memory to support these huge apps. Sure they're bloated; I won't argue that - but at the same time its amazing that we can run them at all - a decade ago it would have seemed ludicrous! Could it be better? Sure - but in my mind, all software is bloated - because even the simplest piece of compiled code I can't run on my old TRS-80 from when I was a kid (heck, even an Arduino has better specs!).