These days, that is true in Corporate IT. You have the choice of investing real dollars to get things faster, more invested faster it gets. But the speed difference is probably not worth the amount spent. Companies find it easier to throw hardware at the issue then speeding up the program(s). Over 35+ years ago, things were far different, back then we did spend plenty of time and $ in making software run faster.

These days, you have the real possibility the program(s) have a limited life span before the next upgrade. With today's hardware, you can bet you will get more performance per $ spent than by changing the software.

IIRC, I think RMS said something like "do not worry about performance, hardware will catch up". In the case of Emacs, it definitely did.

Things weren't actually that different 35 years ago. Your computer would get slow; you'd buy a new one. It would be faster for a while. Repeat. I've been doing this for 35 years, so I remember.

The amount of money spent on software development was a lot smaller and there were far fewer programmers. And they were creating a lot of bloated nonsense that you could install on your 8086, commodore 64, or whatever. Windows 1.0 is a good example. That was released nearly 35 years ago.

These days the one thing that's different is that hardware ages a lot slower. I've been on several laptops with 16GB since 2012. Back in 2012 that was a lot. Now Apple seems to still find 8GB more than enough for anyone (Bill Gates pun intended). Things are moving much slower with hardware.

> With today's hardware, you can bet you will get more performance per $ spent than by changing the software.

With today’s hardware and today’s cost of software engineers…