Increase In Computing Power
This is amazing! Just another example of Moore’s Law.
The visualization below, inspired by the recent 50th anniversary of Moore’s law, tells the story of the trillion fold increase in computing performance we’ve witnessed over the past sixty years. That’s impressive enough, but some of the other finds are downright astounding. The Apollo guidance computer that took early astronauts to the moon, for instance, has the processing power of 2 Nintendo Entertainment Systems, while the Cray-2 supercomputer from 1985—the fastest machine in the world for its time—roughly measures up to an iPhone 4.
And I know someone who swears up and down that an iPhone 4 is not a computer. He spent two hours on the internet and he knows it’s not a computer. He even welshed on a bet he made with me about it. Of course, I spent three years in college as a computer engineering major and 27.5 years in IT with IBM in both hardware and software and I taught both hardware and software, so what do I know? Two hours on the internet trumps all of my knowledge and experience, not to mention all of the other IT people I know who get a chuckle about this. I’m up to about 300 years of IT experience trumped by his two hours on the internet. Amazing!
