Twenty years of software progress

Mac Plus(1986) vs. AMD DualCore/WinXP(2007). Confirmation of what we suspected all along: that in the last twenty years the software industry has made zero progress.

When we compare strictly common, everyday, basic user tasks between the Mac
Plus and the AMD we find remarkable similarities in overall speed, thus it can
be stated that for the majority of simple office uses, the massive advances in
technology in the past two decades have brought zero advance in productivity.

And they don’t even evaluate reliability which is probably the most important and has certainly been going steadily down over the years.

This reminds me of what is still the most powerful programming paradigm: Unix shell programming with pipes. The most basic Unix tools have become so Byzantine that they are slower than they were 25 years ago. But got to thank PoSix and GNU for all those really useful ‘features’ like locales and –worthless-insanely-long-options-nobody-can-remember.