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Processors (AKA CPU’s) have doubled in speed every 18 to 24 months since the early to mid 70’s because of Moore’s Law.

By comparison the Chinese Loongson processor (aka ‘Dragon Core’ or Godson) is doubling speed at a much faster rate – closer to every 12 months.

Intel’s first processor only ran at a clock rate of 108Khz (108,000 cycles per second).

In 2001 the first Pentium 4 processor reached 2GHz (2,000,000,000 cycles per second) that’s well over 18,000 times as fast.

Memory (or RAM) doubles in speed at about the same rate as processors.

While hard drives double in speed every 12 to 24 years.

The capacity – the size or the amount of data you can put on the hard drive is a different issue – it’s doubling every 18 to 24 months.

So, for the last 38 years (1971 to 2009) Moores law has been applied 19 time or to put it another way speeds have doubled 19 times.

So why is the software today so slow.


Simply put, programers and developers have become lazy – back in the early days of computers, software was designed to be as efficient as possible. Everything was slower and came is smaller quantities.

Compared to today where the norm for say RAM is Gigabyte quantities – where as in the 80’s it was more like Kilobyte quantities.

Which meant that if the software didn’t efficiently use the resource available to it, then it wouldn’t run or would be unusable.

Today the idea of just buying faster hardware and that will solve the problem is the solution suggested by those selling bloated software.

Only problem is that when the next version of the software (doesn’t matter what it is) comes out, you will have to upgrade again just to run it properly.

This situation also contributes to the squeezing of as much money out of you as possible, in order to run new software you have to buy new hardware.

It’s not only limited to Operating Systems – the programs you use are more bloated in some cases than the Operating Systems they run on.