This was back when 1 MB was considered and amazing amount of memory. It took two years to write this, about 50K lines of high level code and another 10K or so of assembly. Today you would approach such a project in a completely different way, you'd use much more time to make it look pretty and just that part would probably be much larger than the whole package that I wrote.
The funny thing is that even so many years later the original software is still in use in some places and there is a whole company centered around that core that has been re-written a couple of times to keep it up to date and to expand its functionality.
I highly doubt the present day version would fit in something that small. What's interesting to me is that that old stuff tended to be super productive to work with, zero distractions, just some clearly defined task in a clearly defined environment, if it worked it was bullet proof. No hackers, SaaS, a million connectivity options and no eye candy. Just that one job to be done and done as good as the hardware would allow you to.
But that's exactly my point. I think we forgot to aim at super productive, zero distraction, lightweight. And it would be of high educative value to see this sort of work again. Both on the small scale details and the pragmatic value.
The sad part to me is that most web apps reenact the same functions but in a css-transition-capable DOM. But functionally I'm not sure you get more.
