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> "Technological change has slowed down some" wat

• wpietri 9y ago
  It's definitely true. Technical change in the 60s was enormous. During that period there was a lot of fundamental architectural change and experimentation; that's when they settled on 8-bit bytes as the standard, as well as many other things. Moore' Law became a thing. In the 70s is when we started seeing operating systems that look familiar to us, and even into the 80s it was plausible to introduce a new OS from scratch (see, e.g., NeXT, or Be). But Moore's Law is now dead: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601441/moores-law-is-dead-now-what/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601441/moores-law-is-dead... Per-thread performance has been basically flat after decades of exponential gain: http://preshing.com/20120208/a-look-back-at-single-threaded-cpu-performance/ http://preshing.com/20120208/a-look-back-at-single-threaded-... The iPhone is a decade old; every phone now looks like it, and it's highly plausible that they'll look basically the same a decade from now, possibly much longer. Laptops are 30 years old; they've gotten cheaper, faster, and better, but are recognizably the same. HTML is coming up on 30, and it will be in use until long after I'm dead. TCP is nearly 40; Ethernet is over 40; even Wifi is 20. So it's just easier now to guess what programmers will be doing in 35 years compared to 1965.