Am I exaggerating? You decide. I wrote a popular program for the Apple II (Apple Writer). International best-seller, translated into five languages. It was a word processor that included a macro language.

Are you sitting down? Hand-coded in assembly language, my program ran in eight kilobytes of memory. That left 24 kilobytes for a document, on a computer with 32 kilobytes of RAM.

In the present, I watch my GPU complain that it's run out of VRAM, and I lament that I only have 24 gigabytes available. That's a million times more memory than the Apple Writer document size, but hey -- not enough.

Over a span of just 36 years.

One more story. In the early 1980s, Tom Clancy (Hunt for Red October) called me and asked how to recover content from a disk his computer couldn't read any more. It was a full chapter of his Red October book project, written on Apple Writer.

I said, "Use your backup disk." Clancy replied, "What's a backup disk?"

True story.