Last week, a photo from my social media feeds perfectly illustrated Moore's Law. It shows a computer being manhandled into a local government building in 1957. A little Internet sleuthing revealed that it was an Elliot Series 405, revealing its full spec. These English business computers were 32-bit and had 8k of memory. That's not the entire computer; there were bulky peripherals, and a typical installation cost around £85,000. That's about $1,094,915 (USD) in today's value.
The computer below, shown against the same building, is a Raspberry Pi. Even a base model has 1GB of RAM, costing $100 or less. The photo is a beautiful illustration of Moore's Law, named after the late Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, who observed that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles about every two years. Moore's Second Law also noted that the price fell.
No comments:
Post a Comment