> A few months back, I went to a demo at Parc of the Xerox Star (I first saw
  > the Star in '81 at NCC). It was real interesting to be reminded that
  > hardware has improved a few orders of magnitude in the last 17 years, but
  > software mabey hasn't improved very much. So what can we do to get back on
  > track for the next decade or two? In 20 years will software be 40 years
  > behind hardware? Or will software be dramatically better than it is now.

I often find this sad, especially when thinking about software and systems that died on the vine in the past few decades. I remember fast, efficient systems running on processors of a few hundred megahertz, using 5400RPM disks, and a fraction of a GB of RAM. Why do the same tasks I was performing then take just as long or longer on systems with orders of magnitude more computational power?