August 1995
Beginner
336 pages
6h 4m
English
book
Mythical Man-Month, The: Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition, 2nd Edition
by Frederick P. Brooks
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Chapter 9. Ten Pounds in a Five-Pound Sack
The author should gaze at Noah, and . . . learn, as they did in the Ark, to crowd a great deal of matter into a very small compass.—SYDNEY SMITH, EDINBURGH REVIEW
Program Space as Cost
How big is it? Aside from running time, the space occupied by a program is a principal cost. This is true even for proprietary programs, where the user pays the author a fee that is essentially a share of the development cost. Consider the IBM APL interactive software system. It rents for $400 per month and, when used, takes at least 160 K bytes of memory. On a Model 165, memory rents for about $12 per kilobyte per ...