A very good point! "But the doubling time for transistor density is no guide to technical progress generally. " I would claim increased CPU power has been detri

A very good point! "But the doubling time for transistor density is no guide to technical progress generally. " I would claim increased CPU power has been detrimental to technical quality for some existing products. New features could be added without detailed understanding - "it's only a few percent slower than before" - but with increased processor speeds the code gets worse and worse as performance drops are not a business problem since increasing CPU speeds will take care of them. Until, of course also other problems start to arise due to shoddy work. And then suddenly the free lunch is over, multithreading is required amd at which point the maintainers enter a mutex hell. "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here". Increased processor speeds can either be combined with better algorithms to create magic... or just hide slapdash hacktastic patchwork.