8.9 MB ...

I think a big reason the III's firmware is so small but everything else is so large is due to images. To prove this, simply create a word doc with some sample text, save it, and check the size. Now paste a picture and save it. Way bigger now, even with compression!

Every program nowadays ships with a ton of pictures, from icons to graphics, and they tend to be in less compressed formats, I've seen a lot of tiffs and pngs used, but not many jpegs.

The III doesn't have any pictures, just simple text that can be smashed to hell by a compressing algorithm.
 
I think a big reason the III's firmware is so small but everything else is so large is due to images. To prove this, simply create a word doc with some sample text, save it, and check the size. Now paste a picture and save it. Way bigger now, even with compression!

Every program nowadays ships with a ton of pictures, from icons to graphics, and they tend to be in less compressed formats, I've seen a lot of tiffs and pngs used, but not many jpegs.

The III doesn't have any pictures, just simple text that can be smashed to hell by a compressing algorithm.
The images are not typically part of the program (executable)...

A Word doc is not a program, it's a file that is read by the program.

Different things.
 
The images are not typically part of the program (executable)...

A Word doc is not a program, it's a file that is read by the program.

Different things.
Embedded within many programs are icons of sort, such as the "undo" button. Besides, when I say program, I'm talking the whole package. The exe isn't very useful without any dependencies!
 
What I find interesting is Axe-Edit III.exe is 17.8 MB (when right click, file properties in Explorer) and all it does is control the Axe Fx III (almost twice the size). So, it's not like we are comparing Apples to Apples. With that said, I'm extremely impressed with small file size.
 
My first computer with windows 3.1 an AT386 had a very luxuriant hard disk of 20MB. It could do at acceptable speed spreadsheets, word and even some Adobe application called Pagemaker....
 
I have a theory that higher constraints lead to higher quality. It forces creative solutions and makes you really understand the platform you’re on.

I've read in a few books on how having rules, and constraints, let's your creativity actually thrive since, having limits/rules, allows for new, different, and creative ways/ideas to develop under said constraints. It can be 'freeing' to have limits as it allows for focus and clarity.

An example given is the game of football; look at the amazing, creative plays, different methods, the physical and psychological elements, etc. all flourishing within the boundaries of very rigid, firm rules.
 
Now working on cloud stuff, everything is so complicated; it feels like hardly any of the code actually does anything, it’s all docker files and json manifests. I miss the simpler times of arguing with my brother about the difference between bits and bytes, squeezing everything into a single BASIC file, and having to think really hard about what you were typing because the turn-around was a long time!

I just missed out on cassette tapes on personal computers, I got my feet wet with 5" floppies. That said, early in my career I installed and upgraded a lot of operating systems (VMS and various pre-Linux commercial Unixes) from tape. That'd often take half a day (or half a night depending on how well the outage was going...) or more. These days I can slap together a tailored virtual machine in minutes, and tools like Ansible or Kubernetes let me spin up fleets of VMs or containers to run all kinds of services, just based on a few scraps of YAML. That's very powerful tech!
 
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