DISPATCHES FROM THE STONE KNIVES AND BEARSKINS ERA OF COMPUTING: Cray 1978 versus iPhone 2022.

If you want to see a truly amazing trip down 44 years of memory lane, check out this comparison of the 1978 Cray computer, at the time the most powerful computer in the world, and the 2022 iPhone. I won’t bother giving you the specifics because the narrator, Dave Darling, does a very good job.

The Cray had 303 megabytes of storage and weighed a total of 5.5 tons. Compare that to where storage was 20 years previously:

This is a picture of an IBM hard drive being loaded onto an airplane in 1956. According to @HistoricalPics, which tweeted the picture, it’s a 5 megabyte drive, and it weighed more than 2,000 pounds.

iPhones are available one terabyte drives (with rumors last year that two-TB drives were coming). If this is how much computing has advanced in (almost) a half century, where will it be in another 50 years? But will people in the future do more with them than text and surf Pornhub?