So do I and it was crap because you had to load the mouse driver, as well as decide which one you needed and some programs had their own and some didn't work with the mouse even though they should. Now, you can just ignore mouse drivers and it's all automatic. It really is better. RAM is literally ten thousand times cheaper than then too, so it's no worse for a modern driver to occupy 300MB, which is already pretty huge.
My point was, that obviously it is possible to program a mouse driver very effciently.
And even if it were a full blown cross compatible mouse driver with a lot of device features it is hard to fathom why such a driver would require more than a megabyte or a couple of megabytes of space. The basic functionality can be realized in less than 30k.
We had the whole operating system with GUI (Win3, OS/2 and Linux)run in 4 Megabytes. Sure it was snappier with 8 Mb, but that is still a far cry from the minimum requirements the commercial OS offerings come today.
The way we are wasting ressources is simply insane
I doubt the default USB HID mouse driver in Windows is needlessly big. Just don't use the hideous bloatware that comes with the mouse. I've never had to worry about mouse drivers on Windows in the past probably 20 years, even wireless mice. They just work without thinking. It's much better than the 1980s-90s.
You probably don't use an ancient OS as a daily driver so maybe those extra megabytes really are needed for something important after-all. I'm not saying Windows is super well optimized for space but you can't count the whole growth as waste. Even the default Raspbian Linux for Raspberry Pi requires several GB of storage.
