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Things That Turbo Pascal Is Smaller Than
theodp writes "James Hague has compiled a short list of things that the circa-1986 Turbo Pascal 3 for MS-DOS is smaller than (chart). For starters, at 39,731 bytes, the entire Turbo Pascal 3.02 executable (compiler and IDE) makes it less than 1/4th the size of the image of the white iPhone 4S at apple.com (190,157 bytes), and less than 1/5th the size of the yahoo.com home page (219,583 bytes). Speaking of slim-and-trim software, Visicalc, the granddaddy of all spreadsheet software which celebrated its 32nd birthday this year, weighed in at a mere 29K."
Turbo Pascal was pretty sweet, even though it came from Borland, and even if it was Pascal. It could compile 5,000 lines of code in the blink of the eye. Embedding assembly into it? No problem. It didn't care. The editor was supreme as well. Even when I stopped using TP, I still used the editor every day for a decade after the fact because it could do absolutely everything.
I'm not sure where all the hating is coming from, because TP did not generate hugely bloated executables. The only problem with it was that it eventually was discontinued, so special hacks like paspatch were required to patch TP compiled executables on the P II and higher to allow them to run.
It was actually closer to 512K with all of its dependencies, but it was damn fine.
And that attitude is why we lost the phone and tablet markets. There was a time when Linux was perfect for older systems... the sort of specs that also happen to match up with new small platforms. But we got that 'screw em, let them buy a real computer' attitude and now /bin/touch on my Fedora 15 laptop is 60856 bytes. The little gadget in my XFCE tray to allow me to control the backlight is currently reporting 6200K in resident set. XFCE is supposed to be the 'lighter' alternative to the GNOME freak show. Ever wonder why Google passed all the userland by and made their own for Android? Well now you know and your attitude is what caused it.
Nokia was stupid enough to believe they could build small devices by reusing parts of the Linux desktop, they failed. Good grief, look how much bloat is in little things like esd or pulseaudio. Megabytes of resident set sitting around in case something wants to make a sound? In hardware that had as little as 64MB Ram (Nokia N770 tablet) that sort of resource misuse killed them.
There was a time when System V UNIX would run on machines with a MB or two of RAM, with terminals hanging off serial ports and a couple tens of megabytes of hard drive could run a retail operation.
Yes there is something to be said for trading developer time for hardware. The time to do that is vertical apps and other applications where the number of deployed systems is small compared to the developer hours available. In a mass deployed application the developers should be required to care a little more about what they are asking millions of users to throw away to the great God of the upgrade treadmill.
Democrat delenda est