5 ms·

How the heck does a 7MB image come with an entire OS, emulator, and a fully functional game?! You have to wonder how much of our stuff is bloated.

cstross 13y ago
Go back to the late 80s/early 90s and small System 7 UNIX clones like Mark Williams Company's Coherent 3.2 could install, complete with their entire userland, dev sys, docs, and formatters in around 10Mb of disk space and run on a 286 with 640Kb of RAM. No TCP/IP stack (it used UUCP for comms) and no X11, but if you fast-forward to 1992 you could have Coherent 4, with TCP/IP and X11, running on a 386 with 4Mb of RAM and installed in 20Mb of disk. Even the mammoth (by the standards of the day) SCO Open Desktop 3.0, with X11/Motif and a bagload of other stuff, could install in less than 200Mb of disk space and run reasonably smoothly on a 386/33 with 16Mb of RAM. That was a full-blown workstation grade UNIX distribution with all the trimmings. These days word processors are bigger.
derleth 13y ago
'Bloat' is 'any feature I'm not using right now'. We expect more out of our software, so we write more code to do it, and we complain about bloat because no individual person uses, or expects to use, every feature in every piece of software. However, when anyone comes along to remove features, people complain even worse because, of course, nobody can agree about which features to axe! Everyone is using different subsets!
- smosher 13y ago
  Nah, bloat is any feature I'm not using ever; like java, or gnome-tracker. e: these are just two things that were installed on my system despite not having software that needed them.
- glhaynes 13y ago
  And that "bloat" also comes from features in libraries that the developers use. It's much of what allows development to happen at a much more rapid rate than it did in the past.
nkoren 13y ago
Back in the day, you could boot the entire BeOS kernel, filesystem, GUI, network stack, window & task manager, and web browser off of a 1.44mb floppy disk. Ever since then, I've been unable to shake the feeling that something has gone catastrophically wrong with the way we architect software.
- vidarh 13y ago
  I'm seriously considering switching to using an AmigaOS mail client + UAE (Amiga emulator) instead of Thunderbird because of how slow and bloated it is - there are at least two AmigaOS mail clients still in development, and given that they are written to still be able to run on the old m68k Amiga's (in addition to on newer PPC systems) I have an inkling they'd come out of it quite well.
- informatimago 13y ago
  Well when you add up all the backdoors to the various spy agencies worldwide, plus the obfoscation mass code, I the that accounts for the bloat. good luck finding it amongst the 18 GB sources of Android, or similar for the other systems.
vidarh 13y ago
A large number of us just felt incredibly old. (My first machine with a proper multitasking, GUI based, OS was an Amiga where the OS with in a 256KB - later 512KB - ROM and two 880KB floppies)
gbraad 13y ago
Yes, all 7MB... The image is a compiled to target the OR cpu. But the impressive partbis the emulator itself... The emulator is a full SoC in javascript, based on the OpenRISC instruction set.

cstross 13y ago

Go back to the late 80s/early 90s and small System 7 UNIX clones like Mark Williams Company's Coherent 3.2 could install, complete with their entire userland, dev sys, docs, and formatters in around 10Mb of disk space and run on a 286 with 640Kb of RAM. No TCP/IP stack (it used UUCP for comms) and no X11, but if you fast-forward to 1992 you could have Coherent 4, with TCP/IP and X11, running on a 386 with 4Mb of RAM and installed in 20Mb of disk. Even the mammoth (by the standards of the day) SCO Open Desktop 3.0, with X11/Motif and a bagload of other stuff, could install in less than 200Mb of disk space and run reasonably smoothly on a 386/33 with 16Mb of RAM. That was a full-blown workstation grade UNIX distribution with all the trimmings. These days word processors are bigger.

derleth 13y ago

'Bloat' is 'any feature I'm not using right now'. We expect more out of our software, so we write more code to do it, and we complain about bloat because no individual person uses, or expects to use, every feature in every piece of software. However, when anyone comes along to remove features, people complain even worse because, of course, nobody can agree about which features to axe! Everyone is using different subsets!

smosher 13y ago
Nah, bloat is any feature I'm not using ever; like java, or gnome-tracker. e: these are just two things that were installed on my system despite not having software that needed them.
glhaynes 13y ago
And that "bloat" also comes from features in libraries that the developers use. It's much of what allows development to happen at a much more rapid rate than it did in the past.

nkoren 13y ago

Back in the day, you could boot the entire BeOS kernel, filesystem, GUI, network stack, window & task manager, and web browser off of a 1.44mb floppy disk. Ever since then, I've been unable to shake the feeling that something has gone catastrophically wrong with the way we architect software.

vidarh 13y ago
I'm seriously considering switching to using an AmigaOS mail client + UAE (Amiga emulator) instead of Thunderbird because of how slow and bloated it is - there are at least two AmigaOS mail clients still in development, and given that they are written to still be able to run on the old m68k Amiga's (in addition to on newer PPC systems) I have an inkling they'd come out of it quite well.
informatimago 13y ago
Well when you add up all the backdoors to the various spy agencies worldwide, plus the obfoscation mass code, I the that accounts for the bloat. good luck finding it amongst the 18 GB sources of Android, or similar for the other systems.

vidarh 13y ago

A large number of us just felt incredibly old. (My first machine with a proper multitasking, GUI based, OS was an Amiga where the OS with in a 256KB - later 512KB - ROM and two 880KB floppies)

gbraad 13y ago

Yes, all 7MB... The image is a compiled to target the OR cpu. But the impressive partbis the emulator itself... The emulator is a full SoC in javascript, based on the OpenRISC instruction set.