An uncomfortable question
Ned Konz
ned at bike-nomad.com
Thu Oct 31 01:47:32 UTC 2002
On Wednesday 30 October 2002 04:44 pm, Stephan Rudlof wrote:
> Statement:
> There is one important difference between hard- and software:
> hardware interfaces evolve much faster.
>
> (Some doubt remains: Is this true?)
Not particularly. Look at how long the 80386/80486 instruction set has
been with us -- through several entire generations of processors!
And PCI, and PCMCIA, USB, etc... all of them standards that (though
they're changing gradually) still remain backwards-compatible.
Where hardware does change dramatically, it usually requires stable
software specs: for instance, 3D graphics acceleration has only
become useful through standards like OpenGL and DirectX.
--
Ned Konz
http://bike-nomad.com
GPG key ID: BEEA7EFE
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