🚀 go-pugleaf

>>Get real.  The fact that the Sinclair is practical, cheap, and easy to 
>>develop for exactly the reason that it will be abandoned in favor of a 
>>costly high priest's machine that has no public documentation and that 
>>only a few people know how to use.  This is a world of trade guilds...
>>The whole idea is to conquer megabytes of memory that do the work of
>>an 8K algorithm...

>I LOVE IT!!!  These posts have been great!  However, I must take
>a minor exception: memory usage increase has not been simply a
>silly excursion into time-wasting on the part of programmers and
>memory chip-makers.  There is something real being built "under the
>hood".  The potential of this "something" has not yet been fully
>realized.  This "something" is called Software Abstraction.

ROFL!  Spoken like a true Microsoft Employee.  IMO, it's not about wasting 
time - now your typical major application consists of autonomous teams of 
developers who essentially don't give a damn about the big picture unlike the 
old days.  I wouldn't be so bold as to even give them credit for intentionally 
wasting resources - it has more to do with a general lack of respect for 
hardware.

>I remember programming on the Timex Sinclair.  Sure, I could build
>a quicky-program.  However, I didn't have room to include quality
>checks, support for efficient evolution of the product, support
>for very large data sets, and so on.

It must have been a real drag.  You couldn't waste a few megabytes embedding 
super-secret pop-up screens listing the developers' favorite soft drinks.  You 
couldn't afford to waste memory with exceptions like making sure your 
competitor's software wouldn't run properly, or that icons representing 
services you want to promote cannot be arbitrarily deleted from the desktop.  

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