This is getting off topic from the original post (and the list itself is grossly out of date), but I remember seeing this about 15 years ago...
Mike.
Computer Trivia
You're in Paris, and you decide to use your American Express card. Getting credit involves a 46,000 mile journey over phones and computers.
The job can be completed in 5 seconds.
ENIAC, commonly thought of as the first modern computer, was built in 1944. It took up more space than an 18-wheeler's tractor trailer, weighed more than 17 Chevrolet Camaros, and consumed 140,000 watts of electricity. ENIAC could execute up to 5,000 basic arithmetic operations per second.
One of today's popular microprocessors, the 486, is built on a tiny piece of silicon about the size of a dime. It weighs less than a packet of Sweet' N Low, and uses less than 2 watts of electricity. A 486 can execute up to 54,000,000 instructions per second.
The cost of computing power drops roughly 30% every year, and microchips are doubling in performance every 18 months.
Let's say you're going to a party, so you pull out some pocket change and buy a little greeting card that plays "Happy Birthday" when it's opened. After the party, someone casually tosses the card into the trash, throwing away more computer power than existed in the entire world before 1950.
The home video camera you use to take pictures of the party contains more processing power than an old IBM 360, the wonder machine that gave birth to the mainframe computer age.
The party gift you give is a system call Saturn, made by Sega, the gamemaker. It runs on a higher-performance processor than the original 1976 Cray supercomputer, which in it's day was accessible to only the most elite physicists.
Development of the integrated circuit (invented in the late 1950's) has permitted an ever-increasing amount of information to be processed or stored on a single microchip. This is what has driven the Information Revolution.
Between 1960 and 1970, the number of components on a chip doubled each year from 1 in 1960 to 1,000 in 1970. Since then, the number of components has doubled every year and a half, reaching 100,000,000 in 1990 and 1,000,000,000 in 1992.
Today's average consumers wear more computing power on their wrists than existed in the entire world before 1961.
Computer power is now 8,000 times less expensive than it was 30 years ago.
If we had similar progress in automotive technology, today you could buy a Lexus for about $2.00. It would travel at the speed of sound, and go about 600 miles on a thimble of gas.
