The world could run on older hardware if software optimization was a priority

Unfortunately there is a distinct lack of any scientific investigation or rigorous analysis into the phenomenon allegedly occurring that is called “Wirth’s Law” unlike, say, Moore’s Law despite many anecdotal examples. Reasoning as if it were literally true leads to absurd conclusions that do not correspond with any reality that I can observe so I am tempted to say that as a broad phenomenon it is obviously false and that anyone who suggests otherwise is being disingenuous. For it to be true there would have to have been no progress whatever in computing-enabled technologies, yet the real manifestations of the increase in computing resources and the exploitation thereof permeates, alters and invades almost every aspect of society and of our personal day to day lives at a constantly increasing rate.

Call it the X-Windows factor --- software gets more capable/more complex and there's a constant leap-frogging (new hardware release, stuff runs faster, software is written to take advantage of new hardware, things run more slowly, software is optimized, things run more quickly).

The most striking example of this was Mac OS X Public Beta --- which made my 400MHz PowerPC G3 run at about the same speed as my 25 MHz NeXT Cube running the quite similar OPENSTEP 4.2 (just OS X added Java and Carbon and so forth) --- but each iteration got quicker until by 10.6.8, it was about perfect.