JEAN PARROT wrote in a message to CHARLES ANGELICH:

 JP>    
 JP>      Good morning, Charles.
 JP>  
 WC> Win 3.1 is small and efficient and does 95 percent of what I want
 JP>  WC  to do plus it's setup quite to my tastes just now and I'm
 JP> taking  WC  care not to load up on garbage.

 JP>         In this line of thought, you should have seen the
 JP> "Checkbook"         PRG on the C=128. Had all what was required.
 JP> And so simple too.         I only got less and less use of this
 JP> system when I got to do         digital photoes.

 JP>         Quicken is SO heavy as compared to Checkbook. I have not
 JP> used it         yet, only had a look.

That's true of a lot of software any more.  The authors seem to feel a need
to just keep adding features,  and we end up with bloatware.  Early on in
the field there was some truly elegant programming out there,  stuff that
was written *small* (because there weren't machine resources to waste), 
and yet which would work well in a variety of contexts.  Even earlier stuff
written to run under dos often would look at the available hardware (color
vs. mono,  how many lines on the screen,  etc.) and give you good results
that would work well on _your_ system.

Nowadays we have stuff that seems to have "requirements" that
happen to coincide with whatever the author thought was a reasonable
system,  or what _they_ had.  I just tried a cdrom that came in a book, 
and it says on it "best viewed at 800x600",  but it doesn't say
anywhere that you need win9x to do anything with the single exe file on
there (you do),  and it just plain doesn't *work* when it comes to trying
to use it at 640x480,  which unfortunately is the only resolution available
on the w98 box here.  Oh well...

It's like web sites that insist on this sort of thing,  too,  that you have
to have your resolution set to a certain level (although at least in those
cases you can scroll horizontally) or that you *must* be running a certain
browser (screw 'em!)...

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