🚀 go-pugleaf

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)

cheers

Jules