Software Obesity and Hardware Waste: The Thousand-Fold Performance Gap Between Engineering Excellence and Modern Bloatware

Modern software exhibits a paradoxical inefficiency: applications now consume 1,000–10,000 times the resources of their functionally equivalent predecessors while delivering only marginal productivity gains. This dissertation quantifies the software obesity epidemic through a comparative analysis of historical systems — such as the Voyager I spacecraft (69.6 KB RAM), Novell NetWare 3.12 (4 MB RAM serving 20 users), and the New Horizons probe (64 MB RAM) — versus contemporary equivalents, including Windows 11 (8 GB minimum), Electron-based applications (500 MB+ per instance), and modern web browsers (2–4 GB typical).