Monday, April 25, 2016

Bloat

It is said that code will expand to fill the available memory.  It looks like it will also expand to fill the available network bandwidth:
The average web page is now roughly the same size as the full install image for the classic DOS game Doom, apparently. 
This is according to Ronan Cremin, a lead engineer with Afilias Technologies and dotMobi's representative for the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). 
Cremin points to data from the HTTP Archive showing that, at 2.3MB, the average page is now the same size as the original DOS install of the id Software mega-hit.
I remember back in the '80s, working on a minicomputer that had a real-time OS.  The biggest you could gen the kernel was 64KB.  Punks these days don't no programming ...

11 comments:

Old NFO said...

LOL, and people 'wonder' why the net is slow...

SiGraybeard said...

Another factoid: there are more of those web pages than there are people on the planet. Now mentally envision the number of people who don't have a computer, or access to one, and who certainly don't own web pages.

Bloat expands to fill teh entire Interwebz.

ASM826 said...

My cheap ($300) digital camera is turning out 6 MB .jpeg images. 3 pictures would have filled the hard drive on my 286.

cecilhenry said...

Anybody remember the Amiga computer/operating system??

I had a professor who still used it in 2004.

The Amiga 'windows' operating system used 1024K ram.

Yes K.

Archer said...

Dang it! Now I want to re-play Doom.

Lawrence Person said...

Ah, the classic "in my day..." computer thread...

MS Word 3.01 for Mac would fit on a single 3 1/2" floppy. So one floppy for the OS, one floppy for the program, and another floppy to save on. It got to the point I put copies of the spelling dictionary on all my save disks just to save a step in the floppy dance.

And what a joyous day when I finally got a whopping 60 meg hard drive for about $600 (with discount) in 1989. Now I bet people get 64 GB USB key drives as trade show freebies.

Just think how long it would take to download a 2 MB web page using your 300 baud modem...

Tim Covington said...

I will here similar things all of the time. But, compare the graphics on modern Web pages to those in Doom. Even the text looks better.

Tim Covington said...

I will here similar things all of the time. But, compare the graphics on modern Web pages to those in Doom. Even the text looks better.

R.K. Brumbelow said...

Remember Gopher? asta vista? The wwww? When every page was hosted at CERN? Mosaic? Lynx? ARPANet? anjourin? LOTRD? I worked on VRML back in the late 90's. The WWW is not the Internet, but many people want to assume it is. Plenty of places to still get lost in. But, it was exceptionally harder to take down Lynx or Pine than it is Explorer or outlook, and I am not certain much has really been gained from the first to the last.

Oh yeah, and get off my lawn.

Unknown said...

There was a period of time (early 90's I think?) when Ellison, Gates and Grove were preaching - don't worry about it, unlimited bandwidth, processor speed, memory, database sizes, all are just down the road. Lots of folks took them at their word - Like EVERYONE at Adobe - the company with the most bloated software in existence.

Yes, it's gotten silly - Win 7 was HUGE - I'm avoiding 10 for as long as possible.

Linux runs anywhere from 16MB upto 4G - really tiny in comparison - Debian is just under a 1G, Ubuntu a bit bigger.

matism said...

I was going to ask how large the Drudge page is, but then he is running autoplay videos these days...