Minimalism (computing)

In computing, minimalism refers to the application of minimalist philosophies and principles in hardware and software design and usage.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s programmers had to work within the confines of relatively expensive and limited resources. 8 or 16 kilobytes of RAM was common; 64 kilobytes was considered a vast amount and was the entire address space accessible to the 8-bit CPUs predominant during the earliest generations of personal computers. The most common storage medium was the 5.25 inch floppy disk holding from 88 to 170kB. Hard drives with capacities from 5 to 10 megabytes cost thousands of dollars.

Over time, personal computer memory capacities expanded by orders of magnitude and mainstream programmers took advantage of the added storage to increase their software's capabilities and to make development easier by using higher-level languages. By contrast, system requirements for legacy software remained the same. As a result, even the most elaborate, feature-rich programs of yesteryear seem minimalist in comparison with current software. Many of these programs are now considered abandonware.

One example of a program whose system requirements once gave it a heavyweight reputation is the GNU Emacs text editor, which gained the backronym "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping" in an era when 8MB was a lot of RAM, but today its mainly textual buffer-based paradigm uses far less resources than desktop metaphor GUI IDEs with comparable features such as Eclipse or Netbeans. In a speech at the 2002 International Lisp Conference, Richard Stallman indicated that minimalism was a concern in his development of GNU and Emacs, based on his experiences with Lisp and system specifications of low-end minicomputers at the time.

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