It's the end of an era

Here is Zoomin.exe, a pixel magnifier, running on Vista:


Microsoft finally broke this program. It runs, but no longer sees the screen and only magnifies itself. If you look closely, you'll see it's a 16-bit Windows 3.0 program. Microsoft shipped it as part of the Windows SDK circa 1990.

Do I care that it's broken? Nope, only cavemen (and possibly Voyager) are running applications this old. There are many, many, more and better programs like this around, but I kind of got a kick out of running this one. It's only 7K. No DLL's, resource or config files, yet it has an icon . It really is just a 7K EXE.

In my youth, I once built a Digitalk Smalltalk/V program that did the same thing. I used the tools of the day to throw out almost everything and managed to create something that was 37K. Of course, it needed the VM DLL's, but they were tiny too. I remember being mad when I figured out the Smalltalk VM was taking 256K at runtime (probably for the garbage collector old and new spaces).

For me, Zoomin.exe was kind of a test that Microsoft passed, year after year. The program is 17 years old and is only now broken. Imagine trying the same thing with a Linux distribution.

It was also a reminder. GUI programs could be tiny. Oh computing world, where did we bloat out and go wrong? I guess I'll have to get my kicks some other way.

Finally, this is the sort of backwards compatibility that we aim to achieve with SWT, despite the fact we run on Linux!

Steve