Twice in the last few days, I ran into low, artificial limits on how much text a website would allow me to enter into a field.
Once upon a time, this was reasonable. Disk was expensive. RAM was expensive. Constraints were real, and tradeoffs were unavoidable.
That time is long past.
Out of curiosity, I asked Gemini to help me research the history of nonvolatile storage costs. This is what I learned:
- In 1956, an IBM 350 provided about 3.75 MB of nonvolatile storage for $9,200/MB.
- Today — during a price spike caused by a NAND shortage — a 2 TB SSD costs around $250.
That’s a 99.99999864% reduction in price per megabyte, without adjusting the 1956 price for nearly 70 years of inflation. For all practical purposes, storage is free.
And yet, both places I hit limits this week were meant to hold directions.
In one case, I was updating instructions to cover a scenario that had been missed in the previous version. I couldn’t add the necessary text without hitting the limit. I trimmed the existing content and ended up with something serviceable, but fragile. The very next update will run into the same wall.
This is absurd.
Text (especially text meant to instruct) should be effectively infinite. Modern disks can handle it. Modern memory can handle it. The constraint is not technical; it’s conceptual.
(And don’t get me started on amateurs who think eight characters is enough for a first name, so I end up with mail addressed to “Christop!” See Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names.)