History
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, during the earliest generations of personal computers, 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 of the 8-bit CPUs of the day. Expansion beyond 64K required bank switching or a high-end 16-bit CPU. Storage capacities ranged from 5.25 inch floppy disks holding from 88 to 170kB to 10-megabyte hard drives costing thousands of dollars.
Personal computer memory sizes have expanded by orders of magnitude over time, and mainstream software took advantage of the added capabilities. 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.
As the capabilities and system requirements of common desktop software and operating systems grew throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and as software development became dominated by teams espousing conflicting, faddish development methodologies, some developers adopted minimalism as a philosophy and chose to limit their programs to a predetermined size or scope. A focus on software optimization can result in minimalist software, as programmers reduce the number of operations their program carries out in order to speed execution.
In the early 21st century, new developments in computing devices have brought minimalism to the forefront. It is no longer necessary to buy a high-end desktop personal computer merely to perform common computing tasks. When compared to desktop computers, portable devices such as smartphones, tablet computers, netbooks and plug computers often have smaller memory capacities and slower processors, which have made minimalism an important design concern. Google's Chrome browser and Chrome OS are often cited as examples of minimalist design. In Windows 8, Microsoft has decided to drop the graphics-intensive Aero user interface in favor of the "simple, squared-off" "Metro" appearance, which requires less system resources. This change was made in part because of the rise of smaller, battery-powered devices and the need to conserve power.
Read more about this topic: Minimalism (computing)
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