UNIVAC was a room-sized mainframe computer made by the Sperry Rand corporation in the late 1960s. They had million-dollar memory, two and a quarter ton 100 megabyte hard drives, and required more refridgeration than an outdoor ice rink in the middle of a Las Vegas summer. In 1968 you could pick up a 1.3 MHz CPU with half a megabyte of RAM and 100 megabyte hard drive for a mere US$1.6 million - which was absolutely amazing in those days.
Compare that to my current setup, a 2.54 GHz CPU with 512 MB RAM and 250 GB hard drive for just $1,100. That's 2,000 times as much processing power, 1,000 times the memory, 2,500 times the hard drive space, but it's 1,500 times cheaper!
We've come a LONG way in 35 years...
We've come a long way in just 4 years, too. In 2000 I built my n'th computer system for $2,500. It has 1/4 the processing power, RAM, and hard drive space of my current system, yet cost more than twice as much to build as my current setup.
If this trend continues, I'll upgrade in 2008 to a 12 GHz machine with 2 GB RAM and a terrabyte hard drive for just $500!
When I started school 25 years ago, the total combined hard drive space of every computer, personal and educational, at my entire 25,000-student school didn't add up to a terrabyte.
I do see one welcome trend, however - a significant lessening of the desire for bigger, faster, better systems, primarily because we're now at a point where the most processor and memory-intensive tasks such as digital video editing/rendering are readily available to the home user. While a mid-80's Amiga could do some of what I do, it would have taken it a month to render complex scenese that my current setup can do in 15 minutes.
And that's a LOT of computing power!
For all of that, however, it's still several orders of magnitude slower than the average human brain with respect to total volume of information processed in any given unit of time - and, at 250 W, about 100 times less efficient! |