Bloatware Is Back

Introduction

Something happened this morning which really was a case of me not seeing the wood for the trees, but, shall we say after issues that have lasted for two weeks I finally saw what the issue was and dealt with it. You may have a clue from the title but first I am going to take to through my computer history which to most of you will be like wading through prehistory but may put a smile on your face.

Long, Long Ago ... In The Nineteen Seventies

My second job was as a computer operator for Littlewoods working on Honeywell kit (which you can see in the 1966 film "Billion Dollar Brain")

Data was stored on cards, paper tape, and magnetic tape and I remember once accidentally tangling up the whole companies payroll which was on a massive spool of paper tape that had to be read into the computer which was a huge piece of kit taking up may twenty feet wide by four feet deep and four feet high. I haven't a clue how it worked or what the memory was but my joy involved changing tapes, printing reports and payslips and keeping things running.

One of my colleagues applied for a programmer's job at the head office in Liverpool and said the test was really difficult. I thought it sounded easy and took it and got the job and the first line of the first program I wrote in 1980 to account of the millennium switchover because storage was so expensive that the years were stored as two characters, the century was not included. That is why the whole millennium bug thing was a con and if it happened it was incompetence because everyone knew the millennium was coming.

I left Littlewoods and worked as an analyst, team leader, and project leader at various companies and bought my first home computer that had a memory of about 3K, and worked on an Apple with Visicalc, then an Apple Lisa with a 5Mb disc drive, and eventually got a desktop with a 10Mb disc drive that ran Windows. 10Mb would store one or two MP3 songs.

I wrote one program that got taken by a software house in Liverpool, it was just "Connect Four" but they gave me fifty pounds for it.

I acquired a copy of Microsft Office Programs on about forty floppy discs and saw how program installs were getting bigger and bigger. Then I found out that Excel had a hidden flight simulator built in. This was my first exposure to bloatware. Flight simulators need a lot of data, but that should not be part of your calculation software.

With the advent of GUI (graphical user interface) programs have become more complex, but in 1990 the Dec Vax computer I was working on at Yorkshire Water had 4 Mb of memory, enough for a short MP3 song.

My Google Pixel 4XL has 64 Gb of memory, which is 1,600 times the memory of the Yorkshire Water Dec Vax.

So What Happened This Morning?

A week or so back I started getting warning that my phone was running out of space, I wasn't sure why so thought it was videos. I deleted all the videos and backed them up to the cloud (I have unlimited space there), but the following day I got the same message once again.

I checked my apps, the two biggest were Outlook at 2,8 Gb which I thought was a lot, and Instagram which was half a gigabyte. I had 8 Gb of music so culled a gigabyte of that and thought that would be fine.

Not so.

This morning I got the warning once again.

Looked at my apps once again and saw I had misread the space that Outlook was taking. It wasn't 2.8 Gb it was 28 Gb !!! That is almost half my phone's storage. The total operating system only takes 16 Gb!! Also Outlook does not sync with my Computer Outlook, so I thought just delete it as I can access my email via my browser.

I now have 34 Mb free on my phone

The lesson I have learned is to actually read everything twice, Outlook on my phone is pure bloatware.

This has been a public service announcement for anyone with Microsoft Outlook on their Android phone.