Thompson and Ritchie were among the first to realize that hardware and compiler technology had become good enough that an entire operating system could be written in C and by 1978 the whole environment had been successfully ported to several machines of different types.
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.
You were up at 5 o'clock in the morning and then you'd ride in a caravan because we didn't have big movie trucks or trailers that is the hardware of a movie camp.
The fellow that owns his own home is always just coming out of a hardware store.
My background is in hardware design. I found hardware work to be a welcome change from thousands of hours of programming and that led to the designs you mentioned.
If I was designing a web site for elementary school children I might have a much higher percentage of older computers with outdated browsers since keeping up with browser and hardware technology has not traditionally been a strong point of most elementary schools.
People who are more than casually interested in computers should have at least some idea of what the underlying hardware is like. Otherwise the programs they write will be pretty weird.
Software comes from heaven when you have good hardware.
Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading manuals without the software.
It's hardware that makes a machine fast. It's software that makes a fast machine slow.