For perspective, that's >$320k today. For 'switching apps'. It's always kinda crazy to look back and realize how incredibly minute and small programs were back them. Like 'spellcheck' being a project you'd assign half a dozen programmers to or Knuth would write almost a book about.
> minute and small programs
These are actually still the best programs.
Whimsical follow up here: $100k invested in the S&P 500 around 1984 would be $4.5mm today. Thought some people would like to know this as well :)
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$100k invested in AAPL around 1984 would be worth $329.5M, excluding dividends
At least that’s what ChatGPT says
loading story #50478850
Despite being small, it probably represents more original thought and engineering insight than many modern apps with 100 times the LOC.
The best Folklore.org story on LoC is of course:
One of my favorite programming blogs has a post on exactly that: https://prog21.dadgum.com/29.html
Was it easy though? You are probably hand rolling assembly. For the time it took and he spoke to Jobs and Gates as part of it, it seems small.
I'm pretty sure were it not for Knuth and other programmers solving spellcheck and other problems, big and small, AI wouldn't be able to solve programming tasks today.