Comment by John Corey (Guest)

John Corey (Guest) — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 13:29:42 +0000

Someone noted that the iPhone is probably about as powerful as my old iMac G3, 600Mhz.

Moore's Law

Ken — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 22:37:36 +0000

N.C. State is having an e-recycling event tomorrow, so tonight I stripped down an old PowerMac G3 and a PowerMac 8100 to bring in. I'd already taken most of the parts out of those machines, but it turns out the G3 still had 384MB of RAM in it, and the 8100 still had 64MB and a G3 upgrade card.

This led me to remember the first Mac our family bought around 20 years ago, the original Mac II, for somewhere north of $5000. It came with a 16MHz processor, 1MB of RAM, and a 120MB hard drive. We eventually upgraded to 4MB for something like another $500.

The Mac mini that I'm getting? It has a 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor. It's hard to compare that directly to a 16MHz 68020, but just in terms of clock speed and number of cores, that's 250 times faster, for one tenth the price. It comes with a 120GB hard drive (1000 times more storage than the Mac II); I'm upgrading it to 320GB (2600 times more storage). I'm getting 4GB of RAM, 1000 times more than I put into the Mac II, for $70. That's 8000 times more memory per dollar.

It used to be that a terabyte hard drive was just an unfathomably ridiculous amount of storage. Now terabyte can be had for less than $200. It used to be that all the technogeeks boasted of 2400 bps modems; now we're online at speeds 2000 times faster.

In some ways, it makes me feel old that I remember the primitive days of 1980s computing. But I'm also glad about the fact that I'll (hopefully) still be around twenty years from now, when our laptops can accurately model all of our biological processes in real-time, and when we can store the entire contents of our brains (somewhere around a petabyte) on a two-inch portable drive.

After all, it's important to keep backups.