> And yet, in the 90s, demo writers routinely produced literal operating systems on a single floppy disk. Remember Amiga demos? They 'hit the metal' because the

> And yet, in the 90s, demo writers routinely produced literal operating systems on a single floppy disk. Remember Amiga demos? They 'hit the metal' because they weren't hobbled by drivers and other abstractions. That was possible because the hardware was essentially a "game engine API" (e.g. the hardware was designed to be conveniently used directly, and was also designed with game requirements in mind). Whether that's good or bad is definitely debatable, for instance on the Amiga the need for hardware backward compatibility because of popular games that directly accessed the hardware was definitely stalling the Amiga's progress in the 90's. I don't disagree with most of your points though. We're definitely in an age of unnecessary software bloat, but I think the answer isn't to go back to accessing hardware directly. A lot can be gained by just applying some common sense when writing code. PS: Apple or the iPhone definitely isn't at fault though. The mess already started with the PC and Windows (but this mess also gave us increadibly fast hardware progress in the second half of the 90's by allowing hardware to evolve faster because of driver abstraction layers).