In 1982, IBM brought microcomputers to the business world with its release of the IBM PC. Back then, for $2500, you could purchase an IBM PC that would fit on top of a desk with a central processing unit (the 8088 chip) capable of performing 330,000 operations per second. Today, you can spend less than a third of that amount and get a system capable of performing more than an amazing 2 billion operations per second. If other industries had progressed at a similar pace, we would - have put someone on the moon six months after the Wright Brothers’ first flight.
- be able to purchase a set of automobile tires for $1 that would last over 50 million miles.
- be able to purchase an automobile (if you buy the tires, you might as well have the car) that would get roughly 80,000 miles to the gallon.
- be able to purchase a ticket for an around-the-world airline flight that would last less than a minute (no in-flight movie on this trip!).
- be able to buy a CD with 3,000 cuts for one cent.
- be able to purchase a home for $ ?? that would occupy ?? million square feet.
You would be able to purchase a home for $7,000 that would occupy 8.8 million square feet. The pace of innovation in information technology has been astonishing, to say the least. Consider that it was as recently 1993 that Marc Andreessen created the first graphical Web browser originally called Mosaic and later, Netscape. A decade is not a long time for something as pervasive as the World Wide Web to have been in existence. |
2002 McGraw-Hill Higher Education