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The availability of huge disks has probably skewed the perception of sizes to some extent. 300MB is more than sufficient for an entire operating system, including a GUI and several dozen CLI tools. A full install of Windows 98 was 175MB.

On the other hand, internet speeds have not increased quite as dramatically, so we can still relate with stories of "this app is how big? And it only does what?"

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Said this here a few times already but since you mention it: last month I booted a win98 box. The bliss of small binaries. Everything was snappy even on a Pentium 3. Bonus point: enjoying the Turbo Pascal suite (IDE, Compiler) for a total of 800KB. I want to backport crypto, binary hardening some lisp over win98 and live in MB land (pun not intended).

Indeed. Just the other day I was trying (with no luck) to find a simple drawing app for Android (something like Paint on windows) that was less than 18 MB. Seriously, that sort of app should not need huge executables like that.

You mean something like Markers? (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.dsandler.a...)

301 kB.

I'd bet that they're shipping all kinds of graphics libraries, and probably some support for older Android versions. What drawing app was 18MB?

Or 15MB out of those 18MB are the 100 ad libraries bundled in that serve weird/dubious ads at best.

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