Well, thanks for asking. Life is not fair.

Well said - why did you think it would be?

Hmmm - in K-8 grades they seemed to teach us to be fair ... seems that it is a common decency that we behave as if things are fair.

But they are not. Are they?

Take a look at the high-tech world - the programmers are the "rock-stars" the people highly worshoped for their skills. But it may be a fair question to ask - what have they done for us lately? Did they have anything to do with the most receient top App? Well which App... Let's just take Minecraft (Mojang) for example.

It still has 8 bit graphic look - but it's running in a 64 bit iPhone App so it's got all the power of an angry Federation Constitution-class Star Ship. It may look like 8 bit graphic subroutines, but its using all 64bits of that graphics pipeline to render that screen at some unfathomable rate.

So now I ask you, why couldn't the original Minecraft run this fast? Is it the programmers that have improved the code so much? If you think that may be a possibility check out the programs history ... it started out as a Java Edition 2009 game. Java was never a speedy environment - it had the JRE, an abstraction sitting on top of the hardware, an emulator. Since Minecraft was a success, it was purchased by Microsoft in 2014 for $2.5 billion.

Wow, life ain't fair!

I can not figure out WHY - oh Why is it popular? But it is - and doing well. But who do we have to thank for all that power and improvement? The rock-stars of software get the nod, and take home the big paychecks. But that's not at all were the improvements have come from. Life ain't fair.

Where are the improvements in computers coming from? Well it's the HARDWARE. Not that shinny Software. It is the hardware that has improved year after year, for 70 years now. Guess how much? Go ahead, write you answer on a sticky note, or heck - your problebly reading this on a computer that can do more than on thing at a time... a multi-tasking OS (that technique started in heavy iron systems in the 1960s - but didn't hit the personal desk until 1990s) - now, it's in your pocket, or on your wrist. Ok record your answer in a note somewhere... make a guess. Then multiple your guess by 1000. I'm willing to bet that you are still (after gaining a thousand fold increase) - still missing the mark by 3 to 10 Orders of Magnitude! Let's take a look at how much hardware has changed in one grumpy old man's lifetime ... Bob Martin use to work on the DEC-PDP 8 at 12 bit "minicomputer" first sold in 1965. It was roughly the size of a large refrigerator, and sold for under $20,000 ($150,000 in 2019 dollars). To hear Bob reminess about it ... it was wonderful - a programmer's dream. As long as you dreamed in FORTRAN or BASIC or PAL-8 assembly language.

In 2011 Bob gave a "keynote: The Last Programming Language" via recorded video, with some great production effort and discussed his first love (I don't know maybe it wasn't - ask him) the PDP-8 and compared it to the Mac Book he pulled from his knapsack. Around about the 4 minute mark Bob will tell us that the Mac Book has a 6.4 X 10^22 increase in performance/price rating. And if you are still keeping score... that is a 6 with 22 zeros after it. Do I win the bet - buy me a coffee. Thanks!

Now, it's 2020 and the M1 Apple Silicone chip just launched with increadable preformance - I'm just guessing it's 1000 times better than a 2011 Mac.

Can you fathom what a 10^22 power is? I doubt it very seriouslly. Just to put that in prespective it is only 2.5 X 10^13 miles to the closest star - Alpha Centura.

See Also:

Evolution of the programming languages from iPhone OS 1.0 to iOS 14

Comparing iPhone OS 1.0 with iOS 14 using tree maps.

What does it mean to be "Human-Scaled"?