Re: An uncomfortable question

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