aqk

Authored Comments

It's called bloatware. Today's computers and phones are full of it.

Back in the stoner age, ('60s and '70s) you sometimes had only 40 KB of mainframe space to run a program in.
So you worked very hard to make it fit. And if it couldn't be done in COBOL, then you did it (at least some of us did it) in Assembler.
Unlike today's hotshots, only the strong survived.

Another minor observation or piece of trivia regarding the punch card.
Very few of today's programmers/ IT "specialists" realize that the 80 character text line (in an editor or on a terminal screen) comes from the 80 columns of the 120 year old (at least!) Hollerith punch card eventually adopted by IBM data processing, before the programming library finally made it in the 1970s onto magnetic tape (briefly) and thence to disk.
Alas, Herman Hollerith died long before COBOL was even a punch in Admiral Grace's 80 column card.
If you wish to make a case for it, you could probably even argue that these punch cards were first developed in the 18th century by textile weavers.