It's so impressive how far we've come with technology.
That is pretty amazing. The Cray-1 looks so cool! It looks like something that could power a spaceship.
Adored my Commodore 64!
@chocobunny - We had an Atari 400 then later an Atari 800.
The early Cray computers were regarded with awe by anybody who even half understood what they were. Or to put it another way, they were highly respected machines. But nobody cares about a phone, it's just ... a phone. About as special as a shoe. And 'being a computer' was a Cray's main thing, but a phone isn't first and foremost a computer. That's a secondary thing. Well ok, it was until recently.
The truly remarkable thing is that if you compare a phone with a camera from 1978, it wins massively again. And it does the same trick with a radio, given than a phone is about four entirely different types of radio in one. A phone is even a much better torch than a torch from 1978.
In 1978 a modern smartphone wasn't even science fiction. It is way beyond that.
@CuddleDuncan - Nobody cares about a phone? They sure seem to rush out and buy the latest one every year. Their dog probably also has one. They are just so common these days that they are no longer seen as something magical like the early supercomputers.
@Mike403 Have you heard about moores law? It states that the number of transistors in a given space doubles for every two years of computing advancement. It’s been roughly 40 years, so that’s a factor of 2 to the power of 20, which is around 1 million. The video states that the iPhone was 100,000 times faster than the Cray. I wouldn’t be surprised if todays supercomputers are well above 1 million times faster than the Cray
@Mike403 yes that's exactly what I meant.
If my phone could process over a trillion calculations per sec, you’d think it would be walking by now.
“Come here phone, come here … goooood phone”
Magic happens when there's a vacuum of scientific knowledge.
As with robotics, the more that computing resembles nature, the more incredible it will become.
@CuddleDuncan what kind of phone do you have??? 😂😂😂 Nokia ftw? Jk.
@stormydaycuddle ah, Nokia .... happy days. The best phone I ever had was also my first, a Nokia 8210.
Merlin
On occasion my daughter and I enjoy acting goofy, so we'll walk around in public talking into the Merlin. The looks we elicit from folks under 30 are great.
@CuddleDuncan @stormydaycuddle - My dad's first cell phone was as big as a briefcase and was permanently installed in his car. It was 35 cents a minute to talk on it after paying $30 per month. There were no minutes included in the monthly fee.
@sunnysideup - This is a great example of the true impact of Moore’s Law. In 1981, Apple sold a 5 MB hard drive for $3,500. It would have taken 200 of them to have 1 GB of hard drive storage or the equivalent of $700,000 per GB.
By 2020 (39 years later) Seagate was selling an 8 TB hard drive on Amazon for $145, the equivalent of $0.018 per GB. In other words, just 39 years earlier a GB of data storage cost 39 Million times more than it did in 2020.
This is what a 5MB hard drive looked like in 1956. It could only be leased for $3,200 per month.
@JohnR1972 that is impressively linear! Moores law has a limit though, and aren’t we somewhat close to approaching it? Transistors these days aren’t that many atoms thick anymore ?
@sunnysideup the chart only looks linear because the vertical scale is logarithmic. Each horizontal line is 10x more than the line beneath it.
And you are right about Moore’s law approach it’s “end of life”. His “law” was really just an observation that transistor density was doubling about every 18 months. Apple’s best microprocessors are now built on 3 nanometer technology and we are rapidly approaching single atom thicknesses where further advancements are largely uncharted (optical computing or quantum computing?).
