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Hardware
The hardware that our software runs on has changed quite dramatically since the early days of computing. Today is December 17, 2023. It took just under two centuries to get here from the gargantuan and unfinished Difference Engine. It’s been only 80 years since the electromechanical behemoth of the Harvard Mark I, 71 years since the UNIVAC I, 60 years since the IBM 360, 54 years since the PDP-11, 40 years since the Macintosh, 35 since the laptop, 20 since the iPod, 17 since the iPhone, 13 since the iPad, and 9 since the Apple Watch.
It is possible to calculate the vast increase in computing power represented by that 200-year span. But the numbers wouldn’t make sense to us, because they are well outside any scale that a human can ...
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