It’s the Reverse Shrink Ray!
Apple informed me of a QuickTime update last night, and I went ahead and installed it, on the basis that they’re going to keep telling me about it until I get it done. No particular issues, and I did check to make sure my Pro registration was intact; then I cut it off the desktop and shipped it off to a folder called Installs. Apparently there was a previous file there named QuickTimeInstaller.exe; do I want to overwrite it? I did, but not before noticing that the old version was, literally, old: we’re talking 2002, maybe. Five hundred kilobytes or so. The installer for 7.6.7 was 33.5 megabytes.
And of course, this reminded me of the early 1990s, when 33.5 mb would have been half my disk space. My first non-Commodore box was an XT clone with an NEC processor (10 MHz!), 40- and 20-mb Seagate drives, and a whopping 1.6 mb of RAM. (This latter resided partly on Intel’s Above Board, a full-length card crammed to the max with 256k RAM chips. Lots of them.) Now it takes 30 mb on a Debian Linux server on the Left Coast for me to type this.
canadienne »
19 August 2010 · 11:53 pm
LOL, I still have the Mac SE 20 with the whopping 20MB hard drive (still works fine, I fire it up once in a while to make the young’uns appreciate their Macbooks) and I remember how liberating that was after swapping floppies in the Plus.
Brian J. »
20 August 2010 · 7:58 am
Yahoo! Messenger routinely runs at about 35M in memory, and Firefox sucks down about 150Mb and really bogs down at 300Mb.
For simply displaying text and pictures.
CGHill »
20 August 2010 · 8:07 am
The three biggest memory hogs, right this minute, are Firefox (150 mb), Lotus Notes (140 mb), and TweetDeck (90 mb).
Then again, I haven’t fired up iTunes yet.
Brian J. »
21 August 2010 · 8:00 am
iTunes and its four TSR components which each suck up a couple Mb.
CGHill »
21 August 2010 · 9:49 am
Easily over 100 mb, and it seems to be worse when Genius is being updated.
The Fat Guy »
21 August 2010 · 11:45 am
Only a few will get this…
I laugh, because I’m struggling mightily with a Schminux variant for embedded systems that do wireless magic, and my OS-fu has weakened over the years of selling, and so I detest myself for being so pansy-assed as to detach for a few hours to watch a …