Moore's Law -- IBM Perspective

[Bob Ayers]

Interesting read, check it out:

http://www.forbes.com/2008/06/09/ibm-moores-law-tech-cionetwork-cx_es_0609ibm.html

 

[MAKG]

Maybe I'm missing something, but people were already talking about stacking chips 10 years ago. As well as "quantum computing," due to the limitations on just how small components can be made.

 

[rboyer]

It's pretty funny how that stuff evolves so quickly. When I was 10 years old I had a CoCo2 which ran at a whopping 0.895 MHz and stored all of it's data on cassette tapes. Then I had a TRS-80 Model II which ran at 4MHz and stored data on 8" floppy discs which were amazingly huge. Then a Model 4 which was a step ahead of the game but had no floppy drive and all I wanted for Christmas that year was a 5¼ inch floppy drive for the damn thing! A couple of years later and I had a nice little collection with my prize jewel being an 80386 which was capable of running windows 3.1!! It always fascinated me how that stuff can get smaller and more powerful in a short amount of time. I have a 2gb usb flash drive which I keep in my pocket for work and it's got more storage capacity than 100 of the cassette tapes which I had laying around for data storage back in the early 90's.

 

[LearjetMinako]

It's pretty funny how that stuff evolves so quickly. When I was 10 years old I had a CoCo2 which ran at a whopping 0.895 MHz and stored all of it's data on cassette tapes. Then I had a TRS-80 Model II which ran at 4MHz and stored data on 8" floppy discs which were amazingly huge. Then a Model 4 which was a step ahead of the game but had no floppy drive and all I wanted for Christmas that year was a 5¼ inch floppy drive for the damn thing! A couple of years later and I had a nice little collection with my prize jewel being an 80386 which was capable of running windows 3.1!! It always fascinated me how that stuff can get smaller and more powerful in a short amount of time. I have a 2gb usb flash drive which I keep in my pocket for work and it's got more storage capacity than 100 of the cassette tapes which I had laying around for data storage back in the early 90's.

I keep an old Intel 486 25Mhz processor just to remind me what was then and what is now.

 

[MAKG]

I keep an old Intel 486 25Mhz processor just to remind me what was then and what is now.

25 MHz?

Listen sonny, when I was your age, we had 4.77 MHz and we LIKED it. And we had to WALK to school, uphill both ways in the snow (in southern California).

4.77 MHz is the 8086 spec. Some of the subsequent chips (like 80286) had "turbo" switches that would go faster. Which you needed because all the games triggered off the clock signal and would go WAY too fast.

Oh, and segmented memory is the mind of God.