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secraetomani

And a typical install of Windows 95 was 55 MB. Which included a bunch of images, sounds, ...

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> images

800x600 16 bit backgrounds and 16x16 16 bit icons...

> sounds

MIDI sounds...

We're not living in 1995, anymore.

What, your C compiler includes high-definition image and audio files? What times to be alive...

He was comparing Win 95 to modern software.

Also, as far as I know even stuff like compilers (if they want to support Unicode fully) have to pull in dependencies like ICU, which because of its symbol DB weighs about 30MB.

That's another problem Win 95-era software didn't have to care about...

ICU is a problem of our own making. Computers worked with other languages all the time before Unicode. You could say the same for pretty much any modern dependency.

Weren't (the) BMPs large in size?

I'm pretty sure that even at that time compressed formats were used :-)

JPG was released in 1992, GIF in 1987.

These were used, yes. I am pretty sure Windows in most of 90s used BMPs, e.g. for backgrounds and in MS Paint. [1] Also, GIF is no replacement for BMP.

[1] https://www.fileformat.info/format/bmp/egff.htm

But crucially, it didn't ship any compiler chain capable of building itself; I know compilers were smaller then, but apples-apples...

I'd be curious about comparing the resolution, color depth and compression levels of those images, and the bitrate/compression levels/codec of those sounds. Let's take one wallpaper. Win95 must have included a what, max 1024x768 wallpaper size? Assuming identical compression and color depths, that's still 786432 pixels total, compared to the 4K wallpapers we get today with 8294400 pixels - a larger than 10x increase. That's vastly oversimplifying, as a 10x pixel count doesn't directly translate to a 10x file size, but still, that's just for one image.

Pretty sure sounds in Win95 were MIDI, which aren't even actual audio files.

We are comparing here a full graphical OS with kernel & drivers versus a bunch of command line tools.

And no, Win95 did include real audio files (if small).

Don't make the mistake of assuming a GUI is automatically more complex or more advanced than command line tools.

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