I felt pretty smug a year ago buying a laptop with 6MB of RAM and 120MB of hard disk. I divvied up the former among RAM drive and various flavors of managed memory. I split the latter into six 20MB partitions, to provide a few fire walls. It was hard to imagine hitting limits with all that real estate.

A large software package way back then ate up 3MB of disk. It might require over a megabyte of RAM to run well. Such parameters pale beside modern requirements, however.

I'm not even talking about loading libraries for every possible memory model — I usually stick with just small and large. No, it's all those Windows support libraries that eat disk space. And the gazillions of support tools we now take for granted. A 10MB package is typical these days. Some can be twice that size. If you're a child of the Nineties, let me give you some perspective. In early 1979, I was assured that few CP/M machines would ever have more than 32KB of RAM and 256KB of diskette storage. (You couldn't write enough assembly language to fill up the former. You couldn't afford two floppy drives to go beyond the latter.) Luckily, I ignored those projections and wrote C compilers for machines twice as large. The hardware was there when the software demanded it.

My laptop now has 10MB of RAM. I use on-the-fly disk compression to double the effective hard disk size. I'm looking into networking my PCs so I can have faster file access to a really big disk.

Now there's only one problem remaining. I'm not sure that I'm writing any more code with these wonderful new tools. Or any better code.

P.J. Plauger
pjp@plauger.uunet.uu.net