"About 25 years ago, an interactive text editor could be designed with as little as 8,000 bytes of storage. (Modern program editors request 100 times that much!) An operating system had to manage with 8,000 bytes, and a compiler had to fit into 32 Kbytes, whereas their modern descendants require megabytes. Has all this inflated software become any faster? On the contrary. Were it not for a thousand times faster hardware, modern software would be utterly unusable."
– Niklaus Wirth, A Plea for Lean Software (1995)

via cr.yp.to/bib/1995/wirth.pdf @me_ and @me_

The next 29 years must have been pretty terrifying for poor Niklaus.

These days I feel pretty good about Emacs, once I let go of the idea that it was just a fancy text editor. In the back of my head I still harbor the dream of writing a tiny text editor just for me.