A new "Notepad" needs less than 3 kilobytes to work — a former Microsoft programmer created something unique
Modern apps tend to balloon into gigabytes—ads and trackers hitch a ride and the result is often a heavy download. Ben Baker, once a lead dev at Microsoft, went the opposite way: he hand-wrote a Notepad clone whose .exe is only 2,686 bytes. That’s about 2.6 KB; Windows 11’s Notepad is nearly 150× larger. No telemetry, no fat — just a tiny program that actually does the job.
Called ntpd.exe, it’s pure assembly, speaking directly to the OS through basic APIs. It launches instantly, lets you edit and save files, respects the usual hotkeys and idles without eating CPU. It’s the kind of thing that makes you pause — a functional relic that doesn’t beg for resources.
The author released the code to open access, so any dev can study the bytes. Think of it as a mini workshop for people used to wrapping everything in massive web engines — and a strange, quiet reminder that tight code still exists.