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The difference is that when people talk about hardware, they're talking about the equivalent of film, not abstract "this is central to being a camera which works with visible-spectrum light" concepts. > you will always have [...] > memory, storage First, making a distinction between memory and storage is not an "at all times, in all places" kind of thing. It's more "this is what we do now, in the past, on some systems, it was different, and it may be different in the future" kind of thing. Single-level storage is not currently popular, but it was in the past and may yet come back. It already has, in some limited contexts. Second, we've already seen home system storage go from paper tape to magnetic tape to magnetic disk to metallic magnetic disk to solid-state NAND Flash or close equivalent. Each has vastly different performance characteristics and details in every detail. > human interfaces I'm sure there are some iron-clad universals in HID. I don't know which of those translate from CLIs to touch-screens to gestural interfaces to speech recognition to pupil tracking to... > power management, booting Two things which have changed quite a bit even in the lifetime of "vaguely IBM PC-derived" desktop computers, and even moreso if you widen your scope up and down the power curve to include handheld systems and, you know, Real Computers What Do Real Work. |
Yes, but the point is that there will always be a requirement to manage and persist the data you are working on somehow, and how you go about this somehow dramatically impacts (or should impact) the choices you make at the more abstract level of data structures. It is a fundamental concept that you will be forced to consider in one way or the other. You can have the fastest algo in the world crunching huge amounts of data, but if you then take an inordinate amount of time to store and retrieve results, it's as bad as having blazing-fast storage and crappy algos.
> I'm sure there are some iron-clad universals in HID
I agree that is traditionally considered a subclass of I/O, but I think in recent years we have seen that it's much more important than previously understood. Good software with mediocre UI is ignored while mediocre software with good UI can change the world. This is one of the few real discoveries in our field since the '80s.
>> power management, booting
> Two things which have changed quite a bit
... but are still there in some shape or form, and will forever be there. They are changing the world because people put effort and thought into them as fundamental parts of computing experiences, not one-offs that can be simply ignored as "constant time".