Wirth attributed the saying to
Martin Reiser, who in the preface to his book on the
Oberon System wrote: "The hope is that the progress in hardware will cure all software ills. However, a critical observer may observe that software manages to outgrow hardware in size and sluggishness." Other observers had noted this for some time before; indeed, the trend was becoming obvious as early as 1987. He states two contributing factors to the acceptance of ever-growing software as: "rapidly growing hardware performance" and "customers' ignorance of features that are essential versus nice-to-have". Enhanced user convenience and functionality supposedly justify the increased size of software, but Wirth argues that people are increasingly misinterpreting complexity as sophistication, that "these details are cute but not essential, and they have a hidden cost". As a result, he calls for the creation of "leaner" software and pioneered the development of
Oberon, a software system developed between 1986 and 1989 based on nothing but hardware. Its primary goal was to show that software can be developed with a fraction of the memory capacity and processor power usually required, without sacrificing flexibility, functionality, or user convenience. == Other names ==