On Thu, Sep 05, 2013 at 07:03:53AM -0400, John wrote: > I think it was about 1990 when John Dvorak (or one of the other PC > Magazine pundits) stated that what Moore's law really meant was that > the computer you want will always cost $2500, but that every 18 > months or so the power of that computer is effectively doubled.
That's true now. But earlier on what it meant was that the same amount of computing got cheaper, so it could be more widely available. When I was an undergraduate, the university computer (an Atlas) had to serve the needs of the whole university. In my first job I worked on a DECSytem-10; a machine of roughly the same power as the Atlas. But by now this only had to serve a small university department (perhaps a hundred or so students and others). Later on, at DEC, I worked in the VAX group; these machines were at a price point that meant a small workgroup (maybe ten users) could consider buying one for their exclusive use. A few years on I was working at Apollo computer, who made single- user workstations. Somewhat after that I bought myself my first home PC. This was a 386/20, with 2MB of memory and a 20MB hard drive. I paid a bit over the norm get a 13" VGA+ 800x600 colour display. These machines all had roughly the same amount of compute power, but at very different price points. The PC was, indeed, around the $2000 region. My next PC setup (a Gateway DX2-66/V system) cost around twice that, but that was because I spent close to another $2000 on a ScanJet flatbed scanner and a laser printer; the core computer (CPU, RAM, disk & display) was much the same. Since that time, though, the price of each successive system has come down, while the amount of power has continued to climb. I'm not sure of the exact ratio, but just a single-threaded application on my notebook PC (a quad-core I7 system roughly comparable to a MacBook pro) delivers an order of magnitude more computation than a Cray-1 supercomputer. An application such as PhotoShop that can use all the power of the PC is better than two orders of magnitude faster than the Cray, while the amount of memory and storage has grown even faster than that! -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
