It can't just be me.

In my last job, I did very little actual work - hence the redundancy. However, I never found the time to complete the darned paperwork and training requirements. Now I have far more work, but the same tasks go uncompleted...

Ten years ago, I downloaded all my Japanimation through a 28K dial-up onto a 1GB drive which I archived onto CDs. Now I download the same number of shows via an 8Mb ADSL onto a 1TB cache and sometimes archive onto 4GB DVDs - but the programs are now 10x larger and I still don't have enough storage for it all. However, it's all in 720p h264 which I enjoy on a 23" screen rather than VCD 320x240 mpeg1 on a 13" CRT so at least I can see the progress.

I remember when my 286 with 1MB RAM booted Windows 3.11 in under 20 seconds. Word loaded in under 5 seconds. Why does my quad core behemoth take so much longer to load the 2010 versions when it's way way way over 9000 times faster? I'm not convinced I can see the progress...

I used to take home £4 an hour. Bread was 17p and beans were 9p. Now I take home barely twice that, but bread is 50p and beans are 30p. Public transport has more than quadrupled! Why has everything gone up when my pay stays almost the same?

I used to get about 20 miles to the £1 in my old Escort. Why does my smaller Focus only travel 5 miles for the same money?!

Surely I'm not that old...?

The complexity, although not the overall purpose, of most programs has expanded unbelievably. Your PC is 9000 times faster but the software is telling it to do 18000 more things, almost none of which you want, care about or need.

As for the rest, the illusion of progress is failing to gloss over the more rapid decline hidden beneath.

That £1 is buying you much less fuel?

But the same £1 buys a computer which processes over 9000x as many numbers for the same £1 of fuel. No joke, my Atom 330 is awesome compared to my old 8080 and it uses less juice.

Why isn't my car 9000x more efficient?

Physics.
And people are obsessed with having sat navs and airbags and all sorts of other things that mean your car probably weighs more.

Satnav mass aside, that's true.

It makes me laugh when they show a car on TV that runs on urine and does a million mpg, but weighs about 2oz and would fail every crash-test.

Progression costs?

I think we are in a period of time where we think we have everything, but we have lied to ourselves. We have very little, as you said, we were better off years ago, we could buy more beans and bread with our wages.
Our time is full of "tomorrow", and the wonders that will come with it. Those wonders cost money and we're stumping up the cash. Tomorrow things might be cheaper...

We are also fuelled by bigger, better things. Your new chip can process over 9000x as many numbers, your word processor can do such a huge more many things for you, your car can go faster, is comfier and will run more cleanly, your bread is produced using ingredients, those ingredients are farmed by people who want more money, the bread is probably of a more consistent standard too, all of which costs more.

Sh*t, ain't it?

Cars are still Very Old Tech dressed up in shiny Bezier surfaces. The idea of a piston in a cylinder being moved by an expanding gas to provide motion is very, very old, whether it’s water vapour or expanding gasses from a controlled explosion. A car is forced to move not only you, and the body shell, but a fixed lump of metal designed to contain and control the detonations, and more lumps of metal to move that power from the engine to the wheels. This is Victorian technology, and the Victorians loved large lumps of metal.

So, until cars makers come up with a better form of motive power that is lighter and more efficient, any car will be limited by this.

Not to mention a great big crashproof tank of potential energy

As for computers, a lot of the bloat is due to unnecessary backwards compatibility and lazy, inefficient programming.

I think we are being a bit unfair to the humble motor!

My first car, a 1.4l petrol (well under 100bhp) did around 30mpg, and was positively asthmatic going up hills, but was reasonably spec'd for the time. My next a 1.9l 130 bhp petrol around 38mpg etc... My current car is a 2 litre 170bhp (diesel) which manages to average around 50mpg, considering the design of engines can only be tweaked in (relatively) minor ways, I think that's pretty good progress in 15 years. Just a shame 70 odd percent of the cost of fuel ends up in the governments pocket, else we'd be seeing huge savings in new engine technology.

The first car had no air-con, no sat nav, a basic stereo, no air-bags etc, it was a pretty light motor. Compare with my current one having more air-bags than hopefully you'll ever need, automatic wipers, climate/air-con, leather, xenon automatic headlights etc - it must weigh at least twice as much, if not 3 times, as my first car, yet it's much faster, more efficient and full of comforts. It's progress AFAIC.

Electronics and computing are very different, it's just a pity bloatware kills any major speed improvements of hardware. But then look what you get as the return, fantastic on-line content, streaming videos/tv, interactive websites, content aware filling in Photoshop, ability to create cinema quality output from what 10 years ago would have been considered a workstation, on a computer costing a couple of thousand. Boot back into OS9 if you have the last of the non-intel Macs and watch it fly, but then look at the rubbish internet support, the extension conflicts, poor USB support etc etc.

Power in computers will open the possibility to programmers to do more and more complex tasks, and most of these will require more and more power. Factor in backward compatibility, and lazy programming and you'll soon use up the power. There aren't many real ways Quad Core systems are being used properly in the desktop environment, let alone many Windows users still running 32-bit OSes.

im sure if you ran whatever OS you had on that 286 on new your quad-core, youd see the speed increase

the main source of slowdown in most pcs these days is the hard drive, once SSDs take off we'll be set