One kilobyte is not much data. It's 1024 bytes, so if you think of one byte being represented by one character (not strictly correct but close), I've already wasted over 200 of them right here. It doesn't seem like you'd be able to program much with a mere one kilobyte of data, but prepare to be shocked at what's possible.

The JS1K competition challenges developers to write JavaScript demo with a maximum size of 1024 bytes that runs in a web browser (which may include HTML5). The theme for this particular challenge was The Oregon Trail, as in the Apple II game, not the other thing that was based on it. The winning demo was a 1023 byte physics simulation game (!), and other demos included a realtime 3D rendering of point cloud consisting of over 7000 particles, a multi-player flying game, and animated 3D text spelling out the word "DYSENTERY."

Head over to the link below to play with all of the demos yourself (most of them are interactive), and don't for a moment forget that each one was programmed using less data than it took to write the text in this article.

And now I'm depressed.

JS1K, via Technology Review