🚀 go-pugleaf

On 6 Mai, 03:56, Jules <jules.richardsonn...@remove.this.gmail.com>
wrote:
> On Tue, 05 May 2009 19:16:58 -0400, Michael Black wrote:
> > On Tue, 5 May 2009, Jules wrote:
>
> >> On Tue, 05 May 2009 13:21:03 -0700, UncleEnglish wrote:
> >>> Funny! Yet, 5 or 6 years ago, one of my students left her disssertaion
> >>> on a train, 70k words, 6 floppies on a train
>
> >> 70 thousand words and it needed 6 floppies? That's gotta be an MS format
> >> ;-)
>
> > "Words" is the key thing, he's surely not talking about the size of
> > storage.  When counting Morse Code, one treated every five characters
> > as a word, but in real life, likely the words vary in size, and likely
> > for the worst.
>
> Yeah, I put a guesstimate on an average of 6 characters per word, but I'm
> not sure if that's sane (plus I didn't count whitespace :-)
>
> > 70K * 5 is 350K, just under the size of a 5.25" single sided double
> > density floppy.  The Apple II would store something like 170K on a
> > floppy.  There was a period when there was no double density, so it
> > could be less.  The battery operated floppy drive for the old Radio
> > Shack Model 100 used single sided disks, and would take only 100K.
>
> Sure - but not 5 or 6 years ago...
>
> > Maybe some of the disks were duplicate backups
>
> That would be my guess, so it was very much a tongue in cheek post - plus
> it didn't say that all of those 6 floppies contained the doc, just that
> it was that many left on the train...
>
> > but I can imagine if
> > this was early enough, 70K words straddling more than one floppy even
> > without the help of Microsoft.
>
> I'm not so sure; older wordprocessors were very efficient with their
> storage, with very low overheads for formatting information (I used to
> have a Diamond D5 dedicated WP machine, complete with 8" single-sided
> drives) - it was pretty surprising how much text could be crammed onto a
> disk.
>
> I think the bloat only started to creep in with the GUI-based WP's, to be
> honest. (although it still beats me why someone can send me a Word doc
> that's just a page or so of plain text, and it's several MB in size; it
> must take real talent to make an app that bad)

I just saved the plain text of your posting, including quotes, into
Word 97/03 format and Word 2007 format and it turned out to be,
respectively, 27 and 13Kbyte. I do understand one must feel the need
to dupe MS, even with the use of lies, to feel at home in this group.