Wednesday, October 24, 2007

The Digestive System and Bloating (Software)

After writing about my digestive systems program in my previous post, I thought I might make it available to anyone who is curious about what was happening with multimedia in 1990. If you are interested in getting a copy, just drop me an email at awolinsky_at_3dwriting.com (Replace _at_ with @.) and I'll send it to you as an attachment.

Don't worry about it being too big. It's not. You see, this is back in the days when programmers were restrained by the amount of memory and disk space available. They had to write tight, economic code, and Linkway was amazingly compact.

It had to be. We are running on brand new IBM PCs which were boasting an amazing 2 Meg of RAM and no hard drive, though we were networked.

The digestive system program is actually a collection of files that are created as I developed the it. There are 66 separate files. Of the 66, 25 are images, and three are executables. The rest are fonts, texts, runtimes, and batch files.

I'll be sending it to you as a ZIP file. How big do you think that might be? Are you ready for this? The ZIP file is 359 K. No, I didn't make a mistake. It's kilobytes, not megabytes.

Just for the fun of it, I took a screen shot of this blog. Granted I have a 17" monitor, but that single screen shot in BMP format was 2.93 MB. That single picture is more than 8 times the size of the digestive system program's ZIP file.

In case you are wondering how big the unzipped files are, they are 1.08 MB, still almost 3 times smaller than the single screen shot.

Those were the days. :-)

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