Order of Magnitude Upgrades

I upgrade my personal computer about every 5 years, and my cell phone every 2 years. The degree of technology change at this upgrade cycle is amazing.

I was 13 when the Apollo first landed on the moon. NASA claims that many cell phones, cars, and even some appliances now have more computing power than the original Apollo lander used to guide it's decent to the moon. Ten years later I bought my first personal computer. It was an IBM clone with an 8-bit 8088 processor and 640 kilobytes of RAM. It had no hard drive. Instead, I had two 1.2 megabyte floppy drives. Very rudimentary programs could be run off the floppy drives. I once bought a simple adventure game that came on 3 floppy disks. Occasionally the game would prompt me to change to a different floppy disk. We have come a long way since then, but only in steps.

My next computer was a more powerful Hyundai (yes, they made computers too) with a 16-bit 286 processor. This computer had 3 big upgrades in addition to the faster processor. It had a 1.5 megabyte floppy drive, a modem and a 30 megabyte hard drive. I wondered how I would ever fill so much space as was on my hard drive, but over time I did. I upgraded it to a 40 megabyte hard drive at the cost of $400. Today you can buy a terabyte hard drive, 25,000 times the storage, for a quarter the cost. The modem was only useful to connect to a local community college bulletin board service. There was no widespread email, nor was there an Internet since Al Gore had not yet invented it. Bulletin boards were generally a waste of time, however you could entertain yourself for a few evenings downloading useless freeware games.

My next PC had a 386 SX processor which in theory could used memory greater than 640 kilobytes. In reality all it did was swap data and code from the upper memory to the base 640 kilobyte space when needed. The result was slightly faster program execution, but program size was still restricted to 640 kilobytes of memory. The innovation that came along with their PC was a Windows 3.0 operating system. Graphics could now be mixed with text, and clipboard became used to cut and paste between applications. I did not use Microsoft Word or Excel. At the time, WordPerfect and Quatro Pro were the applications of choice.

I completely missed the 386 DX, 486 SX, DX and DX4 processing platforms. My next computer sported a Pentium 1 32-bit chip running at around 200 MHz. It had a 400 megabyte hard drive and 2 megabytes of RAM. This was the first computer that could multi-task and access memory above 640 kilobytes. I ran Windows 98 on that machine. This was the first machine I owned that was used regularly for email and Internet access. At first, my connection was dial up over a phone line, but later became broadband cable modem service. I kept it for approximately 5 years and just recently retired it.

I now own 2 computers, a laptop and a desktop. The specifications of each dwarf my last computer. Modern day computers have processors with multiple cores, each more powerful that computers made 5 years ago. Memory and hard drive space have become so cheap, that they add little to the total cost of the computer.

What I find most interesting is that current desktop has 125 times the memory, 100,000 times the storage space, a CPU that runs hundreds of times faster and gobbles 8 times as many bits per cycle as my first computer - but they both cost about the same. What will the next 30 years bring?