My toys over the years
At the Southwest Fox conference, I showed a slide titled “My Toys”
I showed the computer, the processing speed and the amount of memory in a table:
Year Machine CPU Speed Megabytes Product (Mhz*MB)
1971 PDP-8 .066 .004 .000264
1981 IBM PC 4.77 .25 1.1925
1991 PC Clone 66 1 66
2005 TabletPC 2000 2000 4,000,000
Both the processor speed and the RAM increased by several orders of magnitude over the decades. The Speed Memory product of my current tablet is 10 billion times (LOG10(4e6/.000264) => 1e10)greater than my first machine!
At this rate what will a machine look like in 10 years?
In comparison, a 747 Jet has about 40,000 horsepower, and a human has about 0.17 horsepower, so a jet is only about 2e5 times more powerful than a person.
Related blog posts:
Why was the original IBM PC 4.77 Megahertz?
Thirty years ago, computers were quite different
Relaxen und watchen das blinkenlights. What lights?
BTW, on another slide I showed a photo of the salmon painted plane I flew to Phoenix: “…among the world’s most intricately painted commercial airplanes”