The difference is that when people talk about hardware, they&#x27;re talking about the equivalent of film, not abstract &quot;this is central to being a camera which works with visible-spectrum light&quot; concepts.<p>&gt; you will always have [...]<p>&gt; memory, storage<p>First, making a distinction between memory and storage is not an &quot;at all times, in all places&quot; kind of thing. It&#x27;s more &quot;this is what we do now, in the past, on some systems, it was different, and it may be different in the future&quot; kind of thing. Single-level storage is not <i>currently</i> popular, but it was in the past and may yet come back. It already has, in some limited contexts.<p>Second, we&#x27;ve already seen home system storage go from paper tape to magnetic tape to magnetic disk to <i>metallic</i> magnetic disk to solid-state NAND Flash or close equivalent. Each has vastly different performance characteristics and details in every detail.<p>&gt; human interfaces<p>I&#x27;m sure there are some iron-clad universals in HID. I don&#x27;t know which of those translate from CLIs to touch-screens to gestural interfaces to speech recognition to pupil tracking to...<p>&gt; power management, booting<p>Two things which have changed quite a bit even in the lifetime of &quot;vaguely IBM PC-derived&quot; 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.