What a collection of wonderful memories. One of the many things I have puzzled over is the way the size of software has increased over the years. For example, I used to use Wordstar 1.8 which did all the basic things one needed to produce documents very similar to the present day office programmes. Yet, if my memory is correct, the application excluding, the spellchecker, occupied about 14KB of space on the 5.25in floppie. I recall an article published in PCW in 1993, I think, which described the all singing all dancing Wordstar on the Osborne transportable computer. This article described how to change four of the print commands which were redundant when using a dot matrix printer to commands of use. The procedure involved delving into the code using a debugger, making the changes to the code and then saving back to the floppie. The formula for the saving involved a satement of the size of the space to be reserved and that was 14 KB.

I had a theory that as RAM became cheaper and cheaper programmers became lazier and lazier and did not need to strive to be economical with their code.