This week I upgraded my home internet service to 10 Gbps, and not because I needed faster speeds, but because it was simply cheaper than my existing 400 Mbps service. A 25x speed improvement for less money? Yes I’ll take that, thank you! This upgrade started me thinking about how much computer technology has improved over the decades. When I was a kid, I often thought that the most interesting period of technological advancement was 50 or 100 years in the past: when a person could be born into a world of horse-powered transportation and telegraphs, and retire in an era of intercontinental air travel and satellite communications. Yet the changes during my lifetime, when measured as order of magnitude improvements, have been equally amazing.

 
Processor Speeds – 6000 times faster, about 4 orders of magnitude

The first computer I ever got my hands on was my elementary school’s Apple II, with a 1 MHz 6502 CPU. Compare that to Intel’s Core i9-13900KS, which runs at 6.0 GHz without overclocking, for a nice 6000-fold improvement in clock speed.

Raw GHz (or MHz) is a weak measure of CPU performance, of course. Compared to the 6502 CPU, that Intel i9 has much wider registers, more registers, more complex instructions, superscalar instruction execution, hyperthreading, multiple execution cores, and other fantastic goodies that the MOS designers could scarcely have dreamed of. I’m not sure if there’s any meaningful benchmark that could directly compare these two processors’ performance but it would be an entertaining match-up.

As impressive as a 6000x improvement may be, it’s nothing compared to the improvements in other computer specs.

 
Main Memory – 1.4 million times larger, about 6 orders of magnitude

In 1983 my family purchased an Atari 800 home computer, with a huge-for-the-time 48 KB of RAM. What’s the modern comparison? Maybe this pre-built gaming PC with 64 GB of RAM? That’s more than a million times larger RAM capacity than my old Atari system, but it’s not even very impressive by today’s standards. Windows 10 Pro theoretically supports up to 2 TB of RAM.

 
Communication Bandwidth – 33 million times faster, about 7 orders of magnitude

Who doesn’t love a 300 bps modem? It was good enough for getting that Atari system communicating with the wider world, connecting to BBS systems and downloading software. But today’s communication technologies are so much faster, it makes my head spin. What am I ever going to do with 10 Gbps internet service… stream 200 simultaneous 4K videos? Download all of Wikipedia, ten thousand times every day?

To put this in perspective, the amount of data that I can now download in one minute would have needed 68 years with that Atari modem.

 
External Storage – 182 million times larger, about 8 orders of magnitude

Over the past few decades, the champion of computer spec improvements has undoubtedly been external storage. My Atari 1050 floppy drive supported “enhanced density” floppy disks with 130 KB of data. While that seemed capacious at the time, today a quick Amazon search will turn up standard consumer hard drives with 22 TB storage capacity, for a mind-bending improvement of 182 million times over that floppy disk.

If you’re a vintage computer collector or a BMOW Floppy Emu user, then you’re probably familiar with the fact that the entire library of every Apple II or classic Mac program ever made could fit on a single SD memory card today.

 
Hardware and Software Cost – 0 orders of magnitude

Despite all these million-fold improvements in computer performance, hardware today still costs about the same as it did 40-some years ago when that Atari system was new. The Atari 800’s launch price in 1979 was $999.95, roughly the same price you’ll pay for a decent Mac or Windows laptop today. The Apple II launched at $1298 in 1977, and the first Macintosh cost $2495 in 1984. In real dollar terms (adjusted for inflation), the cost of computer hardware has actually fallen substantially even while it’s improved a million-fold. That first Macintosh system’s cost is equivalent to $7428 in today’s dollars.

Software prices have also barely budged since the 8-bit days. The first version of VisiCalc (1979) was priced at $100, and today Microsoft Excel is $159. As a kid I mowed lawns to earn enough money to buy $40 Atari and Nintendo games, and today a kid can buy PS5 or Nintendo Switch games for $40. Why? I can’t buy a cheeseburger or a car or a house for 1983 prices, but I can buy the latest installment of the Mario game series for the same price as the original one?

 
Looking Ahead

If there’s anything I’ve learned from the past, it’s that I stink at predicting the future. Nevertheless, it’s fun to extrapolate the trends of the past 40 years and imagine the computers of 2063, if I’m fortunate enough to live to see them. 40 years from now I look forward to owning a home computer sporting a 36 THz CPU, with 90 petabytes of RAM, a 330 petabyte/sec internet connection, and 3 zettabytes of storage space, which I’ll purchase for $1000.