An interesting (as always) article by Joel Spolsky on supposed bloatware:
“Version 5.0 of Microsoft’s flagship spreadsheet program Excel came out in
1993. It was positively huge: it required a whole 15 megabytes of hard drive
space. In those days we could still remember our first 20MB PC hard drives
(around 1985) and so 15MB sure seemed like a lot.By the time Excel 2000 came out, it required a whopping 146MB … almost a
tenfold increase! Dang those sloppy Microsoft programmers, right?Wrong.” (more…)
It includes a reference to a different article on the historic cost of hard drives.