Moore’s Law
Something occurred to me the other week:
In January of 1984, you could get a just-introduced brand-new Macintosh with 128K of RAM (which was already four times the RAM that my Commodore PET had, but never mind that) and a single 400K-floppy drive, for $2500 (in 1984 dollars). It had an 8 MHz chip, and weighed 16 and a half pounds.
Now, eighteen and a half years later, you can get a brand-new Power Mac G4 with 256MB of RAM and a 60GB hard drive, with a 933MHz chip, for $2300 (in 2002 dollars).
Call it 220 months, to multiply RAM by 2,000, storage space by 150,000 (if you consider it unfair to compare a floppy to a hard drive, then consider that there are 20GB removable cartridges available now, which is still 50,000 times as much storage as a 400K floppy), and clock speed by over 100, for the "same" price (which is actually much lower if you count inflation, of course).
(And of course I'm not even looking at other hardware; Intel chips are more than twice that fast, for example, but I don't have as clear an idea of what they were like 18 years ago.)
Which means that, at least on the Mac (and at a particular price range), RAM's been doubling, on average, every 20 months, and removable-storage space has been doubling, on average, every 14 months, and clock speed has been doubling, on average, every 33 months. For nearly twenty years.
I mean, I knew about Moore's Law, and about the popularized version (which states more or less that storage space and processor speed double every 18 months), but I never sat down and looked at that in detail as it's affected my life until the above occurred to me. In my laptop computer that I carry around all the time, I have 4000 times the memory and 150,000 times the disk space that I had when I first started using a Mac. I find that pretty astonishing. (100 times the clock speed ain't bad either, except compared to other platforms.)
But sometimes I'm easily impressed.