Reading these old Atari magazines is interesting for a variety of reasons, but one that continually stands out to me is how different today's hardware is… and not necessarily in a good way!
This evening, for example, I was looking for a way to reassign the function keys on my wireless keyboard. It's a Logitech keyboard I've had for a few years at this point, but I've hit the "why did no-one think this was a terrible idea" turn-off-your-PC button accidentally too many times to want to keep going as is. (Patti also hit it once during a work meeting. Thank heavens for the quick startup time of SSDs is all I can say!)
Eventually, I came across the apparent solution: download an application called Logitech Options, which allows you to change the settings for your wireless Logitech devices. I downloaded it, and was surprised to discover it was two hundred megabytes in size. This is obviously small fry to today's lightning-fast broadband speeds to download, but why on earth is a piece of software designed to change a few settings two hundred megabytes?
Even as (relatively) recently as the Windows 95/98 era, software that Made Things Happen with hardware could fit on a single 1.44MB disk, often with some bonus goodies thrown in there too — and if you look back to the systems being covered in the issues of Monitor and Page 6 that I've been reading recently, you're dealing with computers that had 1MB of RAM at the absolute most — more commonly somewhere between 48K and 512K depending on if it was an 8- or 16-bit machine.
What's amusing to me, given the ridiculous size of that Logitech Options application (which didn't even do what I wanted in the end — it would only let me swap my two mouse buttons over and nothing else) is that back in those early 8-bit days in particular, programmers were absolute masters of cramming useful things into tiny amounts of memory. It wasn't at all uncommon to see type-in listings act as programs that you would run then keep in the computer's memory while you were doing other things — and on all but the most low-end machines you'd be able to do everything you normally would with the computer with this little extra bit of software sitting somewhere in your 64K (or whatever) of RAM.
A good example is the "TYPO" software pioneered by (if I remember rightly) Antic magazine, which was subsequently also used by Page 6 here in the UK. TYPO was, as the name suggests, a program to help ensure that you were typing things in correctly — in this case while typing in program listings in BASIC from magazines. You'd load and run TYPO and it would sit in memory, then as you typed it would flash up letter codes at the top of the screen when you finished writing a line. If the two-character code matched the one printed in the magazine, you'd typed it in right. If it didn't, you needed to check it. Simple. Effective. Took up so little memory you could type in a full BASIC listing with it resident and be able to run the program flawlessly afterwards.
Two hundred megabytes for an application that lets me swap my mouse buttons over? What, exactly, happened?
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