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Hardware progress

8 九月, 2015 - 11:26

Technology is improving rapidly. It seems that a new cell phone or computer is outdated the day after you buy it. This is nothing new. Consider manned flight for example. The Wright Brothers first flight in 1903 lasted only12 seconds and covered 37 meters. 1 Once we understand the science underlying an invention, engineers make rapid improvements in the technology. Within 66 years of that historical first flight, Apollo 11 landed on the moon.

Would you guess that that information technology progress is slowing down, holding steady, or accelerating? It turns out that it is accelerating – the improvements this year were greater than those of last year, and those of next year will be still greater. We often use the term exponential to describe such improvement. Informally, it means that something is improving very rapidly. More precisely, it means that the improvement is taking place at a constant rate, like compound interest. In this section, we consider three technologies underlying IT – electronics, storage, and communication. Each of these technologies is improving exponentially.