30 minutes of thought

I just got back from the bathroom where I was sitting there thinking about how far technology has come.

My first computer:

486sx (33Mhz) IBM with 4MB of RAM, 254MB HDD and a 2400bps modem - Cost: $1,400

Favorite pastime on it: using memmaker and booting into HIMEM mode just to eek out enough memory to play Wolfenstein 3D

Now, the new Apple MacBook Pro’s are out and I’ve finally decided to upgrade. Yay! Here’s the specs:

3.06Ghz Intel (back to the intel!), 8GB of RAM, 500GB HDD, and 108Mbps 802.11g WiFi card - Cost: $3,349

So, let’s do the math here. In 15 years my new laptop will have:

CPU Speed - ~93x faster
RAM - 2,000x more space (and faster… forgot ancient RAM speeds ;)
HDD - ~1969x more space (and also faster, at 7200rpm)
Internet - 45x faster

So 15 years from now, we should expect a laptop that has these specs:

285Ghz processor
16TB of RAM
1PB HDD (our first Pentabyte HDD =)
Wifi at speeds close to 5Gb/sec (hell yeah!)

but it’ll also cost close to $8,000. Maybe the payment plans will be better…

Oh, and to top it off, when I was 15, I would have made $2.50 wasting time at work, and today, I made $50. So 15 years from now I will make $1000 just passing time on the can.

I think my math is off somewhere, or inflation is going to suck ;o)

.: Adam

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 11th, 2009 at 5:16 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “30 minutes of thought”

  • danny Says:
    June 11th, 2009 at 11:04 pm

    you are assuming linear advancement too, and not exponential as it really is!

  • danny Says:
    June 11th, 2009 at 11:09 pm

    I take that back, you are assuming exponential, just not rare and super advanced technology advances. That’s what happened to hard drives in in the early 2000s.

Leave a Reply