Alan Kay wrote:
> No one "of a certain age" has forgetten how to do this stuff. It's 
> really a question of what amount of work should need to be put into 
> optimization in an experimental system that is trying to change. The 
> really annoying thing to me is Chuck Thacker's and Butler Lampson's 
> estimation that today's CPUs (with stuff they connect to, etc.) are 
> about 1000 times less efficient than was the Alto (whose 30th birthday 
> is in the first week of April). This is what is killing experimentation. 

Part of me also wonders what will happen if/when we see multiple 
terahertz machines and beyond.

I think some of the stagnation we see arises from the idea that the next 
generation of hardware will solve any performance problems.  When we 
reach a point where the next generation is twice as fast as "nearly 
instantaneous" and we push the limits of human perception, we may 
(collectively) start to go back and say, "OK, we can't do it 
qualitatively faster, how can we do it better?"  Hopefully, that might 
be an impetus to go back and look at all the work that's been done 
before (and being done now) in a new light.

-Jack

P.S.
If so, it's interesting how limited resources and limitless resources 
could converge to produce similar trends.