In 1954, IBM released the IBM 704 – the “supercomputer” of its time. Since then computer power has stuck relatively close to Moore’s Law and we now have a 1-trillion fold increase in the computing power available to us (or at least to people with access to modern day super computers, the rest of us are close, but not quite there). Something people often don’t think about is the relative tech changes as a fraction of human existence: we spent 3 million years to get to an era where we had an industrial revolution then decades later a PC, then decades later a supercomputer 1 trillion times more powerful than that first computer.
This info-graphic from Experts Exchange shows just how much the recent computer speed changes have developed in 0.00179% of humans existing.
Here’s to another 50 years of computer speed getting ridiculously fast by doubling resistors per square inch in our lovely chips.
