We're all playing supercomputers

[Anayo]

I was watching an episode of the old TV show "Unsolved Mysteries". In the show, a couple answered a classified ad for a variety of Macintosh computer that cost $31,000. The year this took place was 1992. The computer had 32 MB of RAM and a 124 MB hard drive.

My teacher at school showed me an old Silicon Graphics O2 work station a former coworker of hers had given her. I leafed through the instruction manual to discover it had 32 MB of RAM and a 200 mhz processor. It cost $8000 in 1998.

Today I play a custom firmware PSP with a 300 mhz processor, 32 MB of RAM, and a 4 GB flash stick with emulators and music on it. I spent the equivalent of $70 or so for it.

This is bloody awesome.

[Ziggy]

That's the way computers (and most electronics) work. They get smaller, faster and cheaper.

[AppleQueso]

[Niode]

Yep and in 10 years time when we look back at our quad core 3.6GHz systems with 4 GB ram and 2 TB hard drive space. We will laugh that we paid £500 for all of that when £250 will get all that on a device no bigger than todays mobile phones.

[Pulsar_t]

Silicon in its physical form is among the worst investments ever, unless you do productive work using it of course. A videocard you buy today for $500 is going to be worth a tenth of its retail price a few years down the road.

Stiff competition in the CPU market, the Information Superhighway and yes even Windows contributed a lot to making computing affordable for the masses. The sad thing, most of this computing power is gone to waste anyhow. I love the concept behind Folding@home but it's not enough to overcome the wasted potential.

[Limewater]

Yep and in 10 years time when we look back at our quad core 3.6GHz systems with 4 GB ram and 2 TB hard drive space. We will laugh that we paid £500 for all of that when £250 will get all that on a device no bigger than todays mobile phones.

I hope you're right, but I'm becoming pretty pessimistic about Moore's law holding too much longer.

[noiseredux]

I own all the Unsolved Mysteries boxsets. Just saying...

[Pulsar_t]

Yep and in 10 years time when we look back at our quad core 3.6GHz systems with 4 GB ram and 2 TB hard drive space. We will laugh that we paid £500 for all of that when £250 will get all that on a device no bigger than todays mobile phones.

I hope you're right, but I'm becoming pretty pessimistic about Moore's law holding too much longer.

I wouldn't mind short lulls in technological advancement every now and then. For the first time in history humanity is playing catch-up with its own inventions.

[s1mplehumar]

I own all the Unsolved Mysteries boxsets. Just saying...

Robert Stack is the man.

[Anayo]

I have to admit what made me post a topic about this was reading the article about "scariest unsolved mysteries episodes" on X-entertainment. XD