Go back to the late 80s/early 90s and small System 7 UNIX clones like Mark Williams Company's Coherent 3.2 could install, complete with their entire userland, dev sys, docs, and formatters in around 10Mb of disk space and run on a 286 with 640Kb of RAM. No TCP/IP stack (it used UUCP for comms) and no X11, but if you fast-forward to 1992 you could have Coherent 4, with TCP/IP and X11, running on a 386 with 4Mb of RAM and installed in 20Mb of disk.

Even the mammoth (by the standards of the day) SCO Open Desktop 3.0, with X11/Motif and a bagload of other stuff, could install in less than 200Mb of disk space and run reasonably smoothly on a 386/33 with 16Mb of RAM. That was a full-blown workstation grade UNIX distribution with all the trimmings. These days word processors are bigger.

Back in the day, you could boot the entire BeOS kernel, filesystem, GUI, network stack, window & task manager, and web browser off of a 1.44mb floppy disk.

Ever since then, I've been unable to shake the feeling that something has gone catastrophically wrong with the way we architect software.

Yes, all 7MB... The image is a compiled to target the OR cpu.

But the impressive partbis the emulator itself... The emulator is a full SoC in javascript, based on the OpenRISC instruction set.

A large number of us just felt incredibly old.

(My first machine with a proper multitasking, GUI based, OS was an Amiga where the OS with in a 256KB - later 512KB - ROM and two 880KB floppies)

'Bloat' is 'any feature I'm not using right now'.

We expect more out of our software, so we write more code to do it, and we complain about bloat because no individual person uses, or expects to use, every feature in every piece of software. However, when anyone comes along to remove features, people complain even worse because, of course, nobody can agree about which features to axe! Everyone is using different subsets!