Am I exaggerating? You decide. I wrote a popular program for the Apple II (Apple Writer). International best-seller, translated into five languages. It was a word processor that included a macro language.
Are you sitting down? Hand-coded in assembly language, my program ran in eight kilobytes of memory. That left 24 kilobytes for a document, on a computer with 32 kilobytes of RAM.
In the present, I watch my GPU complain that it's run out of VRAM, and I lament that I only have 24 gigabytes available. That's a million times more memory than the Apple Writer document size, but hey -- not enough.
Over a span of just 36 years.
One more story. In the early 1980s, Tom Clancy (Hunt for Red October) called me and asked how to recover content from a disk his computer couldn't read any more. It was a full chapter of his Red October book project, written on Apple Writer.
I said, "Use your backup disk." Clancy replied, "What's a backup disk?"
It seems like we were on a line of steady progression in features and usability through the 80s and 90s, then basically peaked for a lot of software by the 2000s. Once every feature most needed was in, and you spent the last 4 versions making things more user-friendly, what was left? But companies needed people to upgrade to keep their business model going.
I wrote one of the chapters in Digital Deli (https://www.atariarchives.org/deli/cottage_computer_programm...), in a computing world that bears little resemblance to the present.
Am I exaggerating? You decide. I wrote a popular program for the Apple II (Apple Writer). International best-seller, translated into five languages. It was a word processor that included a macro language.
Are you sitting down? Hand-coded in assembly language, my program ran in eight kilobytes of memory. That left 24 kilobytes for a document, on a computer with 32 kilobytes of RAM.
In the present, I watch my GPU complain that it's run out of VRAM, and I lament that I only have 24 gigabytes available. That's a million times more memory than the Apple Writer document size, but hey -- not enough.
Over a span of just 36 years.
One more story. In the early 1980s, Tom Clancy (Hunt for Red October) called me and asked how to recover content from a disk his computer couldn't read any more. It was a full chapter of his Red October book project, written on Apple Writer.
I said, "Use your backup disk." Clancy replied, "What's a backup disk?"
True story.
It seems like we were on a line of steady progression in features and usability through the 80s and 90s, then basically peaked for a lot of software by the 2000s. Once every feature most needed was in, and you spent the last 4 versions making things more user-friendly, what was left? But companies needed people to upgrade to keep their business model going.