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.