4 ms·

> "Python has been used by hundreds of happy users" Hundreds! > "Please don't ask me to mail it to you -- at 1.76 Megabytes it is unwieldy at least..." I can

> "Python has been used by hundreds of happy users" Hundreds! > "Please don't ask me to mail it to you -- at 1.76 Megabytes it is unwieldy at least..." I can not even figure out if this means email or snail mail.

davesque 9y ago
You're probably joking but, just for kicks and to provide some historical context, my guess is email. I seem to recall that attachment sizes would have been limited to something less than that back then. Also, 1.76 MB could have fit onto two HD floppies which would have made it easy to snail mail. Although it wouldn't have been all that hard to download with a 14.4 modem.
- kvz 9y ago
  Hold up! Didn’t the floppies I remember store 1.44MB for us?
  - DiThi 9y ago
    Or 1.38 MiB. Parent said _two_ floppies.
  - e12e 9y ago
    Linux could actually store more, as could some custom programs for dos iirc - ms dos had some conservative standards in place due to early floppies being less reliable I think. I initially became aware because the Amiga floppy drive/format was a superset of dos. You could (with appropriate software) read/write dos floppies on the amiga - but you couldn't read/write amiga floppies on pc hw (not even Linux, I think). See "logical formats": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_floppy_disk_formats https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_floppy_disk_formats
- xtracto 9y ago
  Also to give more context: Back in the late 90s I remember I had a linuxmail.org web-mail account. It featured a whooping 4MB of space. 4MB! That's why when Google released GMail with 1GB of storage in 2004 ( https://slashdot.org/story/04/04/01/0038200/googles-gmail-to-offer-1gb-e-mail-storage https://slashdot.org/story/04/04/01/0038200/googles-gmail-to... ) it really blew everybody's mind.
  - toyg 9y ago
    I’ll just add that it wasn’t a technological limitation - providers were simply profiting by selling every additional MB at hefty prices. When GMail appeared, it broke their business model... but there are still providers selling ridiculously low amounts of space for a lot of money, usually to people who don’t really know anything about the internet.
  - bdr 9y ago
    In fact 1GB was so mind-blowing that people thought it was an April fools joke.
- kzrdude 9y ago
  And it expands a bit with the mime encoding of the attachment, too.

davesque 9y ago

You're probably joking but, just for kicks and to provide some historical context, my guess is email. I seem to recall that attachment sizes would have been limited to something less than that back then. Also, 1.76 MB could have fit onto two HD floppies which would have made it easy to snail mail. Although it wouldn't have been all that hard to download with a 14.4 modem.

kvz 9y ago
Hold up! Didn’t the floppies I remember store 1.44MB for us?
- DiThi 9y ago
  Or 1.38 MiB. Parent said _two_ floppies.
- e12e 9y ago
  Linux could actually store more, as could some custom programs for dos iirc - ms dos had some conservative standards in place due to early floppies being less reliable I think. I initially became aware because the Amiga floppy drive/format was a superset of dos. You could (with appropriate software) read/write dos floppies on the amiga - but you couldn't read/write amiga floppies on pc hw (not even Linux, I think). See "logical formats": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_floppy_disk_formats https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_floppy_disk_formats
xtracto 9y ago
Also to give more context: Back in the late 90s I remember I had a linuxmail.org web-mail account. It featured a whooping 4MB of space. 4MB! That's why when Google released GMail with 1GB of storage in 2004 ( https://slashdot.org/story/04/04/01/0038200/googles-gmail-to-offer-1gb-e-mail-storage https://slashdot.org/story/04/04/01/0038200/googles-gmail-to... ) it really blew everybody's mind.
- toyg 9y ago
  I’ll just add that it wasn’t a technological limitation - providers were simply profiting by selling every additional MB at hefty prices. When GMail appeared, it broke their business model... but there are still providers selling ridiculously low amounts of space for a lot of money, usually to people who don’t really know anything about the internet.
- bdr 9y ago
  In fact 1GB was so mind-blowing that people thought it was an April fools joke.
kzrdude 9y ago
And it expands a bit with the mime encoding of the attachment, too.