Gregory's Server@blacklight @cybeej @Natanox @lorq Abstraction and hardware independence are two very separate concepts. E.g., Multics which has many levels of abstraction but was so tied with the hardware that it was EOLs when it was to expensive to maintain the hardware.
@panda @cybeej @Natanox @lorq true, but in general you build abstractions when you want to decouple the software from either the hardware or the OS. Otherwise it doesn't make much sense to bother introducing new concepts :)