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Comment by Zigurd | Hacker News Reader

DEC filled The Mill in Maynard and multiple huge office buildings along 495. How many people did it take to write code for the next version of VAX VMS?

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An Operating System is far larger and more complex than Messenger.

Somehow I wouldn't be surprised if Messenger had more LOC than an early OS...

Software today has gotten too complex and bloated in a lot of cases.

Yeah, ugh! Who needs other language support anyway, we everyone should just learn English! And pictures! In a messaging app! Everyone should learn to use and read the entire breadth of human emotion via colon and a letter. :p

That's not bloat. Bloat is transporting an apple with a bus (that is transporting nothing else). Modern software bloat is like then transporting that bus via an aircraft carrier, and moving that aircraft carrier by nuking the ocean in the direction into which it should fall. It's not very good.

> Who needs other language support anyway, we everyone should just learn English!

Why not? That's already how our global air travel system works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_English

A typical configuration was 2 to 4 MB of RAM. Just how much OS complexity can you stuff into that?

a lot

All modern operating systems have in desktop configurations memory footprints over a gigabyte. macOS and Windows are about 2 to 3 GB. That's 300 to 1000 times larger than the total memory that's configurable for a VAX 11/780.

The VMS operating system is only comparable to embedded micro kernels these days.

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