They wrote 7MB is impressively small, but they also wrote that it was in 1984. And I guess 7MB in 1984 is likely big... I've heard of computers in the 80s with kilobytes of RAM.
Especially if it's 7MB source code after compressing it into zip.
My first boss told me about his first computer. The entry level model was 4KB of RAM. The upgraded model had 8KB. The salesman looked my boss dead in the eye and said “you’re never going to need 8KB!”
I dont think I owned a computer with more than 2MB RAM until the mid 90s.
in 1983 16kb would have been pretty normal. The Apple Lisa was released in 1983 with 1MB RAM and cost $10k.
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Celebrations aside, it's worth pointing out the productivity juggernaut of 2023 was not always the bloated behemoth that is found on so many workstations.
Coded by a team that included such luminaries-to-be as Charles Simonyi – who had previously worked at Xerox PARC and would later go on to success in Microsoft's application division – it is fair to say that Word was not quite an overnight success.
WordPerfect also presented a threat, having debuted on DOS the previous year.
The first version of Word was not exactly a WYSIWYG application, but Microsoft soldiered on and added features incrementally over the years until the final iteration – Word 6.0 for DOS in 1993.
Just as Word once challenged the dominance of its rivals, it has seen its market share eroded in recent years by competitors like Google Docs.
The source code for Word 1.1a, first released in 1984, can be found at the Computer History Museum.