So in 2000 I was starting at Nokia in Vancouver and one of the things I was asked to design was a music player for a touch screen phone. One of the interesting things is that this device was going to be in the market in 3 years at the earliest. At that time music players using SD cards or internal flash memory had between 16 and 64MB of memory. That gave you enough space for around 20 songs max. So we started designing with that in mind. At some point it dawned on me "wait a minute! how much storage are we going to have in 3 or 5 years?". At that time I used the moore's law (1 doubling every 18 months). So the rounded number we came up with was 100 or 200 songs.
Today, 10 years later, your 100 dollar SD card is between 16 and 32GB with 64GB available for a prime. So basically 1000 times more storage than in 2000; that's 10 doublings or 1 doubling per year! Wow!
Another tidbit I have been following is what type of computer you can buy for 2000 USD. This particular trend I have been following since 1987 when I started reading Byte magazine. At that time 2000 dollars was on the cheap side of prices. Typically prices ran a bit higher than that. I think my first computer (1988 or 89) was an IBM 2 or something with an 8086 processor, 640 RAM, 5MB hard drive and the first version of the 3 1/2 floppy disks (they were making their debut in this machine). At that time I am pretty sure the 80286 was already available but it was too expensive to buy. At school we had 8086 clones with 640KB, 2 floppy drives and no hard drives. I am pretty sure that is what you could buy with around 2,000 US dollars (I need to check my facts though).
So today we can buy pretty powerful computers for less than a 1000 USD. But for 2000 bucks you can get a huge gaming machine with an Intel I7 Quad core processor at 2.8Ghz, 6GB RAM and 650GB of hard drive; not to mention an unbelievable graphics card (Dual ATI Radeon HD 5770 with 1GB of memory), DVD/CD reader writer, etc.
Processor speed has increased 500 times; but if we include the quad core idea then it is 2000 times or 11 doublings (is that a word?).
RAM capacity has increased 10,000 times or 13-14 doublings.
Hard drive has increase 100,000 tunes or 17 doublings (approx).
In addition to that I have not included inflation which supposedly has been 27% ; which I doubt. I mean this year alone gold has gone from 700 to 1350! Inflation 27%? yeah, right! At any rate, if we factor the 27% inflation (ha!) then we should be paying 2, 540 for the same 2000 dollars back in the year 2000. But we are now paying around 1,000 for a run of the mill machine. So there you go, another double (or halving of the price).
One side comment: this is why I totally get Apple when they launch a flash memory only laptop or Cannon when they launched a flash memory only camcorder 3 or 4 years ago.
Plus now we can get flat screens, wireless LANS, cellphones, bluetooth, blueray, etc, etc.
This is one of the cool things about working on the high tech industry; you get to design things that will work with technology that will be available in the future. Although this is also a downer when you go to the store and see only the old stuff available. You get so used to working with things that will be available in the future that current things are no longer so exciting.
Anybody want to venture what we will have in 2020? Don't ask me, I only work 3 years ahead :) I get the feeling that we will have a quantum leap that will take us in another direction; totally unexpected. So no need to make predictions, they are overrated.
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