[gerdesj]

My Commodore 64 has a USB interface nowadays (and a few replaced caps). Originally it only had a tape "drive" ie cassette. After a few years we got a 1541 floppy disc unit. Tick, tick tick, whiirrrrrrrr (think: trilled r on speed), fut (etc). Instead of 10-15 mins to load a game it loaded in a fair few seconds. Bear in mind that the 64 refers to 64 kilobytes.

  $ ls -lh /usr/bin/cp
  -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 123K Apr  3 19:00 /usr/bin/cp

The copy command on this laptop is 123Kb! ls is 135K. Elite on the C-64 has filled 3D polygonal space ships, space stations and stuff, a whopper of a galaxy and a HUD that gives you an excellent idea of what is where in 3D. You get a trading system and ship upgrades etc. Oh and music - The Blue Danube should play when one is docking with a space station. Obviously you'll need a driver for the joystick and keyboard too. You don't get the whole 64Kb to play with either - a fair bit of that is used by the system itself.

Before the C64 I used a ZX81 and before that a ZX80 - they had roughly 1 kilobyte of RAM. The ZX81 had a RAM pack upgrade which added 16Kb. It was a bit wobbly and required a strip of Bluetac to stop it crashing the computer when nudged. An uncle of mine calls "bloody luxury" on that - he learned programming with punched cards - probably ForTran.

This laptop's kernel is 12M and initramfs is 14M and a fallback image of 70M. Add to that a microcode image (7M).

You'll be glad to hear that Kermit weighs in at a svelte 26K (I've just installed it from the Arch AUR)

[flir]

It's not that the programs are getting bigger. It's just that the bytes are getting smaller.

[IgorPartola]

A byte just doesn’t go as far these days as it used to.

[vidarh]

Elite on the C64 did not have filled polygons. It had hidden line removal. Still impressive.

Funny part about Elite is that they supposedly limited the number of galaxies to maintain the illusion that it was manually created instead of built at runtime using a pseudo random number generator with a preselected seed.

[gerdesj]

"Elite on the C64 did not have filled polygons."

You are correct - I was conflating it with the later PC effort. When you get to my age (etc).

Sadly, nowadays the plain text of the legalese bollocks that you don't even realise you've signed up to is larger than entire games of yesteryear.

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

What's in that initrd. Surely busybox doesn't take up 14M.

[gerdesj]

I've just discovered zstd! The cpio archive is 34M.

Busybox is 521K and udevadm is 572K. ext4.ko is 2.4M and libsystemd-shared-253.3-3.so is 3.5M. usr/lib has quite a lot of file in it eg libc.so.6 at 1.9M.

[ajsnigrutin]

just the "cp --help" is around 5k (uncompressed)