I just installed Adobe FrameMaker 7.0, which is high-end document managment software: software like Microsoft Word is just not suitable for large complex documents such as "books" and the like. The CD it came on had around 500 megabytes of data, which is about what one would expect: installers, the program, help files, samples, templates, and the like.

This was an upgrade from a previous version (which the installer had to find before it would continue), so I dug in my software closet for my old product box. I had been using version 3 from 1992, and the entire product was delivered on four floppies (and if you don't install the templates and examples, it only uses the first two). The current FrameMaker 7.0 binary - just FRAMEMAKER.EXE - is 4.5 megabytes.

I don't actually bemoan this, really: this software is so much more capable than the previous versions, and I like having all the examples and auxilliary data provided. Hard disk space and RAM are more or less free these days, and I'm not so sure that time spent on "footprint reduction" is really any better spent than on "quality control" or "adding useful features".

But it does make me feel like a dinosaur for my own concern with minimizing the size of my own software. I remember when adding a feature to my nbtscan tool caused the size to go up: NBTSCAN.EXE is now 36,864 bytes.