Kookaburra asks “will Longhorn eat RAM?”
My “official Microsoft approved answer”: too early to talk about minimum or recommended requirements. We probably won’t talk about minimum requirements until right before launch.
The answer I give my friends after they get me drunk: “yes.”
The rest of his answer is worth reading, where he explains his answer a bit more in depth, without running afoul of the Powers That Be at Microsoft. Still, this got me thinking about how much I miss the days when computers weren’t as powerful as they are now. Not because I’d like to go back to the days of 286’s and Motorola 68000 processors (ick), but because the limited resources forced programmers to weigh features against bloat, to code for small sizes as well as functionality, and so on.
The first computer I owned was a Mac Classic, with 1Mb RAM (that’s not a typo — one megabyte) and no internal hard drive. My senior year of high school, I did all my papers on that machine. I had two 1.4Mb floppys: one with System 6.0.7 to boot the computer, and one that had Microsoft Word v4 and every paper I wrote that school year.
Let me stress that: one floppy. Microsoft Word and every paper I wrote in a school year.
I miss that.
You know, as it stands right now, I won’t buy Microsoft Word. But if they could dig into their archives, pull out the source code for Word v4 for Mac and update it to run on Mac OS X, I’d pop down cash for that in a heartbeat. Best damn word processor I ever used, mainly because it was a word processor, not a over-priced, over-featured, kludgy, pain in the ass piece of bloatware with every conceivable feature tossed in merely because it could be.
But that’s just me.
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