Am I exaggerating? You decide. I wrote a popular program for the Apple II (Apple Writer). International best-seller, translated into five languages. It was a word processor that included a macro language.
Are you sitting down? Hand-coded in assembly language, my program ran in eight kilobytes of memory. That left 24 kilobytes for a document, on a computer with 32 kilobytes of RAM.
In the present, I watch my GPU complain that it's run out of VRAM, and I lament that I only have 24 gigabytes available. That's a million times more memory than the Apple Writer document size, but hey -- not enough.
Over a span of just 36 years.
One more story. In the early 1980s, Tom Clancy (Hunt for Red October) called me and asked how to recover content from a disk his computer couldn't read any more. It was a full chapter of his Red October book project, written on Apple Writer.
I said, "Use your backup disk." Clancy replied, "What's a backup disk?"
I used Apple Writer in on Apple II machines in my public library in the 80s. I can't say I remember a ton about it but it's definitely a name I remember. I remember using AppleWorks on the machines at school, but I liked Apple Writer better and lamented that I wasn't permitted to use it at school (because the teacher said she wasn't familiar with it and couldn't help me if I had problems).
About Apple Works ... Apple paid me massive royalties for Apple Writer but got tired of that arrangement pretty quickly. So they made an outright-sale deal with the Apple Works guy.
Then the Apple Works guy refused to answer after-release bug reports unless he got ... wait for it ... royalties.
I suppose it depends on your perspective as to whether this is really a different world from today... I recently wrote the firmware for a USB NFC reader (in C) and it uses much less than 8KB of RAM, maybe half that. I know that's not a word processor, but people are in fact still coding within such tight restraints in $current_year.
I guess one could launch Claude Code on a quixotic project to create optimally terse 6502 assembly for some imaginary project that might never execute on actual hardware. Hmm ...
It seems like we were on a line of steady progression in features and usability through the 80s and 90s, then basically peaked for a lot of software by the 2000s. Once every feature most needed was in, and you spent the last 4 versions making things more user-friendly, what was left? But companies needed people to upgrade to keep their business model going.
In context, around 1980 we bought 1.5MB of memory (core, real core, hand threaded core) for our Burroughs mainframe, we paid more than $1M (1980s) dollars for it. With 3MB our 1MHz mainframe supported 40 users.
You make do with the memory and cycles available, things get easier as the resources get less tight, it's easy to use things like garbage collection rather than doing the hard yards and managing memory yourself, or to break branch prediction by using virtual objects
> There's a lot of talk these days about how the individual cottage programmer is on the way out.
It feels like we're actually returning to the age of the individual cottage programmer. LLMs are really a force-multiplier allowing a single dev to do what was once the work of a whole team.
I wrote one of the chapters in Digital Deli (https://www.atariarchives.org/deli/cottage_computer_programm...), in a computing world that bears little resemblance to the present.
Am I exaggerating? You decide. I wrote a popular program for the Apple II (Apple Writer). International best-seller, translated into five languages. It was a word processor that included a macro language.
Are you sitting down? Hand-coded in assembly language, my program ran in eight kilobytes of memory. That left 24 kilobytes for a document, on a computer with 32 kilobytes of RAM.
In the present, I watch my GPU complain that it's run out of VRAM, and I lament that I only have 24 gigabytes available. That's a million times more memory than the Apple Writer document size, but hey -- not enough.
Over a span of just 36 years.
One more story. In the early 1980s, Tom Clancy (Hunt for Red October) called me and asked how to recover content from a disk his computer couldn't read any more. It was a full chapter of his Red October book project, written on Apple Writer.
I said, "Use your backup disk." Clancy replied, "What's a backup disk?"
True story.
I love HN for this kind of serendipity.
I used Apple Writer in on Apple II machines in my public library in the 80s. I can't say I remember a ton about it but it's definitely a name I remember. I remember using AppleWorks on the machines at school, but I liked Apple Writer better and lamented that I wasn't permitted to use it at school (because the teacher said she wasn't familiar with it and couldn't help me if I had problems).
About Apple Works ... Apple paid me massive royalties for Apple Writer but got tired of that arrangement pretty quickly. So they made an outright-sale deal with the Apple Works guy.
Then the Apple Works guy refused to answer after-release bug reports unless he got ... wait for it ... royalties.
Long time ago. Still pretty funny.
> my program ran in eight kilobytes of memory
I suppose it depends on your perspective as to whether this is really a different world from today... I recently wrote the firmware for a USB NFC reader (in C) and it uses much less than 8KB of RAM, maybe half that. I know that's not a word processor, but people are in fact still coding within such tight restraints in $current_year.
I guess one could launch Claude Code on a quixotic project to create optimally terse 6502 assembly for some imaginary project that might never execute on actual hardware. Hmm ...
It seems like we were on a line of steady progression in features and usability through the 80s and 90s, then basically peaked for a lot of software by the 2000s. Once every feature most needed was in, and you spent the last 4 versions making things more user-friendly, what was left? But companies needed people to upgrade to keep their business model going.
In context, around 1980 we bought 1.5MB of memory (core, real core, hand threaded core) for our Burroughs mainframe, we paid more than $1M (1980s) dollars for it. With 3MB our 1MHz mainframe supported 40 users.
You make do with the memory and cycles available, things get easier as the resources get less tight, it's easy to use things like garbage collection rather than doing the hard yards and managing memory yourself, or to break branch prediction by using virtual objects
A fantastic read.
> There's a lot of talk these days about how the individual cottage programmer is on the way out.
It feels like we're actually returning to the age of the individual cottage programmer. LLMs are really a force-multiplier allowing a single dev to do what was once the work of a whole team.
> It feels like we're actually returning to the age of the individual cottage programmer.
True. I've recently been vibe-coding a number of projects that I wouldn't tackle if I had to ... what's the current expression ... "hand-code" them.
Very cool!
Just out of curiosity, what word processor do you use today?
LibreOffice, for the most part. Still an open-source True Believer.
Potentially interesting website, but it's impossible to use due to ads plague.