portability?

A while back, I read slashdot's interview with Chuck Moore.
  
http://slashdot.org/developers/01/09/11/139249.shtml

As far as Chuck is concerned, I am not worthy.  But he said
something
that caught my eye.  "I'm not interested in recoding C
applications. My
experience indicates that most applications are
hardware-dependent."
What does he mean?  That solutions to problems tend to
involve specific
hardware, and that portability is over-rated?

Just some random chatter..

Ben

On Sat, 30 Sep 2006, Ben Collver wrote:
> As far as Chuck is concerned, I am not worthy.  But he
said something
> that caught my eye.  "I'm not interested in
recoding C applications. My
> experience indicates that most applications are
hardware-dependent."
> What does he mean?  That solutions to problems tend to
involve specific
> hardware, and that portability is over-rated?

Operating Systems exist to provide abstract,
hardware-*independent* 
interfaces to applications. Without that, we'd get the kind
of 
"portability" common in the Windows-world, where a
"portable" application 
runs on Window 95, NT *and* XP. This can't be real...

See also my article ``What Makes An Operating System
"Portable"?''
at http://www.feyrer.de/NetBSD/portability/portability.htm
l.


  - Hubert