It's especially poetic given that the HotSpot vm that was purchased by Sun, and developed by Anamorphic ('Animorphic' in some articles) Systems, was originally designed to run Smalltalk / Self.
> A few months back, I went to a demo at Parc of the Xerox Star (I first saw
> the Star in '81 at NCC). It was real interesting to be reminded that
> hardware has improved a few orders of magnitude in the last 17 years, but
> software mabey hasn't improved very much. So what can we do to get back on
> track for the next decade or two? In 20 years will software be 40 years
> behind hardware? Or will software be dramatically better than it is now.
I often find this sad, especially when thinking about software and systems that died on the vine in the past few decades. I remember fast, efficient systems running on processors of a few hundred megahertz, using 5400RPM disks, and a fraction of a GB of RAM. Why do the same tasks I was performing then take just as long or longer on systems with orders of magnitude more computational power?