There are all sorts of asinine challenges in the ocean of mediocrity that is social media, and let me assure you, this isn’t one of them. My “48K challenge” is something I came up with when I noticed something disturbing on my “smart” phone: The size of the calculator app is 8MB. That of the alarm clock is 19MB. And my personal favorite, the messages app (just SMS, that is) is a whooping 204MB.
Are these people serious?
When I was a kid, you could pack an entire video game in 48KB. In other words, the space the calculator app requires is the equivalent of more than 165 video games for the ZX Spectrum – my first computer.
It goes without saying that technology has advanced a lot; the games of the 80s can’t be technically compared to those we have today. And yet, it feels programming has become sloppy.
I’m of course generalizing, but it feels as if the more the resources we have, the less the creativity and the greater our laziness. It all leads to resource hogs that take too much space and are often buggy. Because, hey, let’s all keep updating all the time.
And so, I gave myself what I termed the 48K challenge. I decided to make a retro-style video game in JavaScript, that had to be 48KB or less. The results were intriguing and revealing – and a little bit disappointing, but not in the way you imagine.
