This week on Shop Talk, Dave and Glen dig into the viewer questions from Dave’s tiny Notepad experiment: if TinyRetroPad is only a few kilobytes on disk, why does Task Manager show it using hundreds of megabytes of RAM?
That question opens the door to executable size, DLLs, Windows memory reporting, Crinkler, assembly language, MASM, C, RichEdit controls, Unicode, accessibility, file-size limits, and the eternal question of whether modern software really needs to be this big.
We also look at what “just one more feature” would cost in a tiny app: tabs, autosave, spellcheck, regex, dark mode, better undo, Unix line endings, word count, and large-file support.
Plus: Windows Defender false positives, whether AI could beat the 4K challenge, possible future episodes on Win32 programming, Amiga development, clipboard internals, CAN bus projects, Dave’s necklace, and whether engineering skill matters more than programming joy.
Questions discussed include:
• Why does a 3K Notepad use 502MB of RAM?
• Is Crinkler cheating?
• Could the same thing be written in C?
• Does x64 assembly still matter?
• What would tabs, autosave, spellcheck, regex, or dark mode cost?
• Why use RichEdit?
• Why only ANSI and not Unicode?
• Why did Windows move away from this programming model?
• Could AI produce an even smaller version?
• Why does antivirus flag tiny hand-built programs?
• What future projects should Dave tackle next?
Shop Talk is the weekly Q&A show from Dave’s Attic, where Dave Plummer and Glen Hodges discuss viewer questions, engineering stories, retro computing, software history, Windows internals, cars, hardware, and whatever else the comments drag into the shop.
Dave PlummerHost