A few years ago, as a 1st April joke, I set up a DOS/Windows 3.11 disk image on our PXE network boot server. It included a functional Word 6 for Windows, and th

A few years ago, as a 1st April joke, I set up a DOS/Windows 3.11 disk image on our PXE network boot server. It included a functional Word 6 for Windows, and the gzipped image was fitting in 12 MB... PCs back then could still boot without UEFI (and run Windows 3.11 if it was properly configured). It booted almost instantly. Same for opening Word. Having used that version of Word when it was the latest one, I can say the current ones have quite some added functionality (lots of very tiny things, and a few bigger ones), but I'm totally sure the same could be done with 10x less memory usage if MS would care about it. But there's no incentive to do it. Computers are faster and have lots of memory, and we don't depend on floppy disks any more. It would just cost them more money. Not saying that this is a good thing (I think the opposite, especially that I start thinking that software bloat might have a non-neglectable environmental impact), but as long as nobody complains strong enough (or as long as the EU doesn't come out with an anti-softare-bloat law... seems just a dream but who knows), that wont change. And I can clearly remember I had the same bloat-software feeling when I tried Office 2000 or XP, compared to Office 97, so there's nothing so new here. As a final note, I've recently seen the source code of MS Word for Windows 1.0 on a GitHub repo (MS released it, see original release on Computer History Museum: https://computerhistory.org/blog/microsoft-word-for-windows-1-1a-source-code/ https://computerhistory.org/blog/microsoft-word-for-windows-...). It was pure C, with even very large parts of code written in assembly! But the code is really ugly... totally incomparable to current C or C++ coding standards, patterns and language capabilities.