{"id":551,"date":"2002-07-27T18:32:51","date_gmt":"2002-07-28T01:32:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2002\/07\/27\/551.html"},"modified":"2002-07-27T18:32:51","modified_gmt":"2002-07-28T01:32:51","slug":"moores-law","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2002\/07\/27\/moores-law\/","title":{"rendered":"Moore’s Law"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Something occurred to me the other week:<\/p>\n

In January of 1984, you could get a just-introduced brand-new Macintosh<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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).<\/p>\n

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).<\/p>\n

(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.)<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I mean, I knew about Moore's Law<\/a>, 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.)<\/p>\n

But sometimes I'm easily impressed.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Something occurred to me the other week: In January of 1984, you could get a just-introduced brand-new Macintosh with 128K…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=551"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}