Maybe fundamentally is an extremely load bearing word here, but just in the hardware itself we see far more abstraction than we saw in the 60s. The difference between what we called microcode in an 8086 and what is running in any processor you buy in 2025 is an abyss. It almost seems like hardware emulation. I could argue that the layers of memory caching that modern hardware have are themselves another layer vs the days when we sent instructions to change which memory banks to read. The fact that some addresses are very cheap and others are not, and the complexity is handled in hardware is very different than stashing data in extra registers we didn't need this loop. The virtualization any OS does for us is much deeper than even a big mainframe that was really running a dozen things at once. It only doesn't look like additional layers if you look from a mile away.

The majority of software today is written without knowing even which architecture the processor is going to be, how much of the processor we are going to have, whether anything will ever fit in memory... hell, we can write code that doesn't know not just the virtual machine it's going to run in, but even the family of virtual machine. I have written code that had no idea if it was running in a JVM, LLVM or a browser!

So when I compare my code from the 80s to what I wrote this morning, the distance from the hardware doesn't seem even remotely similar. I bet someone is writing hardware specific bits somewhere, and that maybe someone's debugging assembly might actually resemble what the hardware runs, maybe. But the vast majority of code is completely detached from anything.