What was the most technically advanced decade?
Didn't it begin with Turing's enigma decoding computer in the early 40's?
In the 80's when homecomputers became a thing, the hardware was'n that much different between model a and model b. A lot of them ran a z80 and no machine was absurdly stronger than the other.
My guess is that during the 90's things took off in a bizarre fashion. I remember 286 machines at friends' home in the early 90s and a Pentium III on my Aopen AX6BC in 1999. Imho that leap was bigger than the one between Turing and the first home computers (but I might be wrong 
I didn't open wikipedia on anything for now 
).
The last decade didn't do a lot on performance but more on energy efficiency.
I think it was the 70's with the start of microelectronics, that made possible to build the machines that Ada Lovelace of Ramon Llull imagined and designed. And to have them at home to play games with the MSX! 
The second one is very late 80s, when the back-propagation applied to deep-learning networks (LeCun et al.) combined with big data started to produce to give something that resembles artificial intelligence.
I'm amazed that small tools that would take some Kilobytes on an 80s computer do need several Megabytes these days. Total lack of skills (or time given by the boss).
Hehe. And you're not even counting the DLLs that carry even more functions you use (maybe unknowingly) in modern programs. So if you trace those too, we're talking much more.
I'd say skill is part of it, but it's the target platform and toolchain that bite us nowadays. For example, getting rid of the MSVC libraries is a tough battle that eventually shrinks down your EXE size and DLL dependencies to below 50KB. But of course you lose CRT and C++ STL (maybe for the better 
)
What I really blame though is the advancements in hacking techniques. Recent compilers fill your EXEs with ****load of security mechanisms to prevent things like buffer overruns and data-execution...etc. It's a never ending battle to always develop counter measures, and those counter measures take a toll on your programs. They inflate them and slow them down. So yeah computers are faster but they're spending a lot of their power on useless crap because 1% of the population are looking to hack into your computer. That's why systems like MSX are lovely. Innocent, simple and clean 
Anyone heard of a virus on MSX?
