There's a recipe for revolution for you, make a product 6 orders of magnitude (so if your initial version is 10, it would be 10^9 or 10,000,000 times) bigger for 6 orders of magnitude (10,000,000,000) cheaper.
If you can do that you've got something...
I like to give my own personal example. The first hard disk I bought held 33 megabytes and cost me $888, and that was a LOT for a college student in 1988. Today you can get a 1GB disk for $200. So for 1/4 the price you get 30,303 times more storage. I now have single pictures that are larger than my first hard disk could hold.
My first 'real' computer, a Texas Instruments 99-4/a circa 1982ish, held 16 kilobytes of memory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments_TI-99/4A
I expect my next computer will have between 4 and 16 GB of RAM but lets be conservative and call it 4. That is a 250,000 fold increase in RAM.
My first PC was a Radio Shack / Tandy 1000tx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tandy_1000
It had 640k of memory. This was 40x more than my TI but only 1/6240th of what a new 4GB machine will have. Again, this was in 1988, only 20 years ago.
This phenomenon isn't slowing down either, we are still living in the age of Moore's Law
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law
We're getting to the edge of what physics will allow tho!
-----Original Message-----
From: David Farber
To: ip
Sent: 9/4/2008 5:00 AM
Subject: [IP] Summary One of your readers...My memory
Begin forwarded message:
From: Gene Spafford <spaf@cerias.purdue.edu>
Date: September 4, 2008 1:31:51 AM EDT
To: dave@farber.net
Cc: "ip" <ip@v2.listbox.com>
Subject: Re: [IP] Re: One of your readers...My memory
So, to summarize what I got:
There were several one-off fully transistorized computers built by
various groups in the mid-1950s.
The first commercial system that was offered for general sale that was
completely transistors was the 608, announced by IBM in April of
1955. It had 3000 transistors. In current dollars it was possible to
buy a base model for a modest $700,000.
The price for transistors used by IBM in their machines circa 1958 was
approximately $2 each (or $20 current), as cited in Thomas Watson's
autobiography, Father, Son, & Co., on page 296 (thanks P. Capek and DV
Henkel-Wallace).
I wanted to verify a calculation I had used in a magazine article (to
come out in October) that in 50 years of semiconductor computing,
we've seen almost a nine order of magnitude drop in per-transistor
cost in current dollars (although we've also seen an increase in
transistors per system use, by a factor of about 6 orders), and about
7 orders of magnitude drop in per-byte cost in secondary memory (about
$.10 per byte of drum in 1958). Of course, other costs, including
main memory have also dropped in a similar fashion. Total system cost
has dropped by a factor of about 500, but capabilities have grown
tremendously as well (I don't have a measure of that, but in the
millions of times faster, I believe).
This all goes to points I've been making in invited lectures over the
last year, but I wanted to reverify my numbers for the print article.
(And I am going to let the magazine have priority on the essay, so I
won't expand further until October...unless I end up speaking at your
institution. :-)
My thanks to everyone who responded. It was fascinating, and I
greatly appreciate your willingness to respond!
--spaf
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