A Half-Century of Progress


The figure below summarizes the key characteristics of some machines and shows the dramatic changes that have occurred in just over 50 years. After adjusting for inflation, price/performance has improved by almost 100 billion in 55 years, or about 58% per year. Another way to say it is we’ve seen a factor of 10,000 improvement in cost and a factor of 10,000,000 improvement in performance.




Review: A Computer History
    Which component was NOT included in the IBM PC?

      Floppy disk drive
      Intel microprocessor/CPU
      Microsoft operating system (DOS)
      Optical mouse
Result: