The original MS DOS 1.0, (go ask your IT Guy what it is) consisted of about 4000 lines of code, approximately 120 pages, enough for a novella.The next big thing, Windows 95, remember that? Around 8 Million lines of code. We are already talking 242 copies of War and Peace or Lord Of The Rings here.
Windows XP started with 45 Million lines and also supported over 10 000 drivers, out of the box. That is more than double the amount of drivers supported for printers, sound and screen cards, motherboards, etc; than lines in the original MS DOS code itself.
Windows 7 that we all know and love, is guessed as containing 50 Million lines. That is more lines of code than words in the Encyclopædia Britannica.
It is not just for the love of numbers that I am boring you with this, but to illustrate a point.
The later versions of Windows all have to be backwards compatible, to a certain degree. This means that some of the bugs from Windows 95 had to be carried over to Windows 8, with more and more increasingly complex work-arounds and fixes to make sure that the new features also work.
And that code has to interact with other software as well, there is probably just as many lines in Microsoft Office now.
Imagine the effort and time needed to ensure that it all works just right, just so.
It all has to be checked and tested, then released into the wild for people to play and break with, before it ends up on your PC.
When your IT company comes and installs your Accounting software, and then tweaks and customises it further for your specific needs, we know what happens sometimes.
Sometimes the different changes and work-arounds and new ideas, just doesn't work.
The developers have to find out and trace back to what the work-around and fix for bug A is in order to get feature Z to work and get past error B.
And just when you think you have it right, there appears a ghost in the machine, where the different lines of code start to interact in other weird ways.
Because we can never be satisfied with what we have, we always want more.
But imagine doing your workload on a typewriter and having to file it all.
Sometimes the extra time waiting for the developer and IT Guy to make sure everything is right works out to a day or three saving, and isn't that worth it?
