“One of the first machines I ever wrote programs for was a PDP-8/I. This machine had a 1.5-microsecond cycle time. It had 4096 12-bit words in core memory. It was the size of a refrigerator and consumed a significant amount of electrical power. It had a disk drive that could store 32K of 12-bit words, and we talked to it with a 10-character-per-second teletype. We thought this was a powerful machine, and we used it to work miracles.
I just bought a new Macbook Pro laptop. It has a 2.8GHz dual core processor, 8GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD, and a 17-inch 1920x1200 LED screen. I carry it in my backpack. It sits on my lap. It consumes less than 85 watts.
My laptop is eight thousand times faster, has two million times more memory, has sixteen million times more offline storage, requires 1% of the power, takes up 1% of the space, and costs one twenty-fifth of the price of the PDP-8/I.”