Speed now & then (Space and time?)

On Thu, 29 Mar 2018, Murray McCullough via cctalk wrote: Application of "Moore's Law" calls for a logarithmic increase in speed, such as doubling every 18 months. Yes, the rate, in terms of bits per second has grown a lot. Similarly storage capacity has grown. HOWEVER, a variant of "Boyle's Law" warns that software and content will expand to fit all available space and speed. Once, if your handwriting is bad enough, you could type your grocery shopping list into Electric Pencil. Took a few seconds. later WordStar. Scripsit. WordPervert. Microsoft Weird. Does Clippy have a template for it? (PC-Write was a welcome respite in that growing bloat!) It's kinda like: the plane flight is half an hour shorter, but the airport pre-processing in an hour longer. Once, the operating system, such as PC-DOS 1.00, fit on a single sided MFM 160K floppy disk. Now, much software comes on DVD, because CD-ROM (2/3 GB) isn't large enough! A memo announcing change of room and time for a meeting is a very short paragraph. That used to be about half a kilobyte. Now, it tends to be a few MB. It seems that some serious effort has to go into wasting so much capacity! HTML has helped that along. One college administrator managed that with ease. He created the memo in his word processor, printed it on his color printer, signed it, SCANNED it, and attached the 24bit-color picture as an attachment to an email. The subject line of the email was: "FYI". The text, other than the attachment was: "See attachment". The attachment was an uncompressed picture of a line of text in the middle of a full sheet of paper: "The curriculum committee has been moved to room D-233 at 2:oo" But, in the memo, there was a horizontal rule that was not quite horizontal; one end was a few pixels higher than the other! - scanning with the paper not quite aligned may well be the easiest way to accomplish THAT! But, that was almost a decade ago. I wonder whether he is now attaching MP4s? MP4s mean that now, not only does it take MUCH longer to create the document, we can now waste MUCH more of the reader's time! I find it very annoying that when GOOGLE'ing to find a simple answer, many of the first hits are YouTube. A few seconds glance at a text document will likely tell me whether the answer to my question is there. Or a sketch and maybe a photograph of somebody's hardware setup. Instead, sit through minutes of talking heads. With background music to make it hard to make out what is being said! Youtube's "auto-generated CC" is a poor substitute for text. Dancing kangaroos and yodelling jellyfish has let form triumph over content! When will we finally have smell-o-vision? Yes, certainly, the hardware is much faster, and has more storage space. Yet, the task takes longer, and storage space runs out just as quickly. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com