In the late 1970s and early 1980s, programmers worked within the confines of relatively expensive and limited
resources of common platforms. Eight or sixteen
kilobytes of
RAM was common; 64 kilobytes was considered a vast amount and was the entire
address space accessible to the
8-bit CPUs predominant during the earliest generations of
personal computers. The most common storage medium was the 5.25 inch
floppy disk holding from 88 to 170 kilobytes. Hard drives with capacities from five to ten
megabytes cost thousands of dollars. Over time, personal-computer memory capacities expanded by orders of magnitude and mainstream programmers took advantage of the added storage to increase their software's capabilities and to make development easier by using
higher-level languages. By contrast,
system requirements for
legacy software remained the same. As a result, even the most elaborate, feature-rich programs of yesteryear seem minimalist in comparison with current software. One example of a program whose system requirements once gave it a heavyweight reputation is the
GNU Emacs text editor, which gained the
backronym "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping" in an era when 8 megabytes was a lot of RAM. Today, Emacs' mainly textual
buffer-based paradigm uses far fewer resources than
desktop metaphor GUI IDEs with comparable features such as
Eclipse or
Netbeans. In a speech at the 2002 International Lisp Conference,
Richard Stallman indicated that minimalism was a concern in his development of
GNU and Emacs, based on his experiences with
Lisp and system specifications of low-end
minicomputers at the time. As the capabilities and system requirements of common desktop software and operating systems grew throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and as software development became dominated by teams espousing conflicting, faddish
software development methodologies, some developers adopted minimalism as a philosophy and chose to limit their programs to a predetermined size or scope. A focus on
software optimization can result in minimalist software, as programmers reduce the number of operations their program carries out in order to speed execution. In the early 21st century, new developments in computing have brought minimalism to the forefront. In what has been termed the
post-PC era it is no longer necessary to buy a high-end personal computer merely to perform common computing tasks.
Mobile computing devices, such as
smartphones,
tablet computers,
netbooks and
plug computers, often have smaller memory capacities, less-capable graphics subsystems, and slower processors when compared to the personal computer they are expected to replace. In addition, heavy use of graphics effects like
alpha blending drains the battery faster than a "flat ui". The growing popularity of these devices has made minimalism an important design concern.
Google's
Chrome browser and
ChromeOS are often cited as examples of minimalist design. Another example is
Windows 8, where
Microsoft implemented the "simple, squared-off"
Metro appearance, which was less graphics-intensive than the previous
Aero interface used in
Windows 7 and
Windows Vista. This change was made in part because of the rise of smaller, battery-powered devices and the need to conserve power. Version 7 of
Apple's
iOS made similar changes for
user experience reasons. ==Usage==