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The "My, How Far We've Come" Department...
Consider these accomplishments:
- Desktops running at 1.5 GHz.
- Almost 200 gigabytes of storage in a single paperback
book-sized disk drive.
- A global communications network that enables average
people to access limitless information, and to publish to
the world from their homes and small offices -- something
that required the resources of a multinational corporation
just five years ago.
- New forms of manufacturing, such as nanotechnology and
molecular self-assembly, that promise incredible changes
to the things around us.
As fantastic as these things are, they're the reality of
today and of our near tomorrows. Yet because of the amazing
rate of innovation we've grown used to during the past few
years, these things don't impress us -- we take them for granted.
But it is worth stepping back, occasionally, to realize just
how far we've come, so that we can appreciate just how far
we yet have to go.
This week, RCFoC reader Richard Meyer (with some details
filled in by Larry Boufford) offers us one awe-inspiring example.
This is a Digital VAX11/780 minicomputer introduced 23 years
ago; it's arguably the most popular minicomputer ever built.
A basic system was five feet tall, cost around $150,000, weighed
hundreds of pounds, contained less than one megabyte of memory,
consumed six kilowatts of power, and often needed special
air conditioning and a raised floor. This yielded a then-impressive
one million instructions per second (1 MIPS). (http://www.openvms.compaq.com/openvms/20th/vmsbook.pdf
and http://www.nwfusion.com/columnists/2000/0828edit.html)
Below is a Compaq iPAQ H3600 handheld. It's five-inches
tall and costs about $500. It weighs about six ounces. Including
its battery. It has 32 megabytes of RAM and 16 megabytes of
ROM memory. Twenty-three years AV (After-VAX), it delivers
142-times the compute power of that VAX --while being carried
down the street in the palm of your hand. (http://www.compaq.com/products/handhelds/pocketpc/
- Specs. are from Pen Computing Magazine - http://www.pencomputing.com/WinCE/PPC/PocketPC.html
and http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/Hardware/Machines/DEC/vax/vax700.html#section:vax700
).
That amount of change, in twenty-three years. Now, just imagine,
what the NEXT twenty-three years of the ever-more rapidly
changing face of computing will bring...! Don't blink!
This is an excerpt from the "Rapidly Changing Face of
Computing, " a free weekly multimedia technology journal
written by Jeffrey R. Harrow, Principal Member of Technical
Staff for the Corporate Strategy group at Compaq. A more extensive
version of this discussion, as well as others around the innovations
and trends of contemporary computing and the technologies
that drive them, are available at http://www.compaq.com/rcfoc
. Jeff's opinions do not necessarily reflect the opinions
of Compaq. The RCFoC is a service of, and Copyright 2000,
Compaq Computer Corp."
This is an excerpt from the "Rapidly Changing Face
of Computing, " a free weekly multimedia technology journal
written by Jeffrey R. Harrow, Principal Member of Technical
Staff for the Corporate Strategy group at Compaq. A more extensive
version of this discussion, as well as others around the innovations
and trends of contemporary computing and the technologies
that drive them, are available at http://www.compaq.com/rcfoc
. Jeff's opinions do not necessarily reflect the opinions
of Compaq. The RCFoC is a service of, and Copyright 2000,
Compaq Computer Corp."
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