BSD started life with a distribution tape of System 7 UNIX from Western Electric. Microsoft created Xenix on the 68000 (TRS16A) from the same tape. I still have a functioning TRS16 with Xenix in my basement. I used it in 1983 to bootstrap 10 UNISYS 1100 mainframes running UNIX*1100 from Bellcore. I had to fix some of the segment swapping code in the kernel to accomodate more users. I also had to fix the tty interfaces to the underlying OS1100 GCS subsystem. After 25 years as a UNIX professional, I still prefer that OS and the numerous imitators. QNX is my favorite embedded solution today.
Yes, I know the history, having started in the VAX/UNIX era. The Red Hat distro LINUX I have on my box right now has evolved from that heritage, and, sure, if it aint broke dont fix it ... but my point was that the pace of evolution is SW is so much slower than hardware. And I speak as a UNIX/LINUX fan and advocate. It could be worse, windows could have take n over the world. Thank God for Linus Torvalds. :-)
In retrospect, that may be a bit unfair towards SW innovation, as the Athlon is still derived from x86 architecture, so even thought the athlon is 10,000 times more powerful than the 80286, the ISA system engineering has been more incremental.
There has been a lot of innovation in CS, but it seems the processes of standardization is more powerful than innovation... this I think is a direct consequence of Moore's law, which has the side-effect of being so powerful that innovations are irrelevent. e.g. remember 'lisp machines'? Great idea, except that they became slower than PCs and standard-product-based Sun workstations pretty quick. And look at supercomputers today: Take thousands of Opterons and slap 'em together. Someone engineering a careful optimized vector CPU will get crushed (notethe many failed supercomputer/paralell-computer firms).