One thing that's missing from the comparison is that the Elliott 405 likely came with a full set of documentation, down to the circuit level, whereas Broadcom has kept much of the Pi's SoC details proprietary.<p>In 60 years, archives and museums will still have great primary-source information on the Elliott 405 and its contemporaries. Will the same be true of the Pi? It's easy to focus on the smaller, cheaper, faster, but it must be realised that a significant amount of openness has been lost; and not merely because computers have become more complex, but also because there are commercial interests strongly discouraging us from understanding the details of how these machines work.
Just for fun, if you extrapolate to 2065 you get something so small it's invisible and practically free, with a cycle time in the hard x-ray to gamma range, more than 150TB of main memory, and an output bandwidth comfortably fast enough for at least ten life-size holographic displays.
In tech space, even 9 years can produce 1000x results. I love this microSD storage example, 2005 vs 2014: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/1jyVev4.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/1jyVev4.jpg</a>
The cost efficiency of the Elliot, adjusted for inflation, was 1445 dollars per cpu cycle per second (when running at the listed peak speed)<p>For the Pi Zero, it is 0.000000005 dollars per cpu cycle per second.
The part that's missing in the comparison:<p>Elliot 405: Used to run business calculations<p>Pi Zero: Used run a sprinkler system<p>What has been really interesting to me over the last several years that these stick computers have been around is how people are using giga-Hertz range processors with an huge operating system and truckloads of memory for stuff that's easily done with a small 8 bit processor with K's of RAM vs G's of ram and a simple time-sliced tasking mini OS written in an afternoon.<p>Don't get me wrong, it's great that one can buy a computer like the Pi Zero for $5. I'm afraid something is being lost in the process. Maybe it doesn't matter. I mean, if one can get something the size of your pinky that cost less than coffee at Starbucks to run Linux...
I submitted the same post <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10689371" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10689371</a> 11 hours ago. But 4 hours ago, dang moved my comment to this post which was created 3 hours ago. It's very weird.
Technological progress is an excellent example of how <i>deflation</i> helps the average person. Your money buys more and more compute power each year.<p>Central banks are targeting <i>inflation</i>, which slowly robs the saver of purchasing power.<p>Areas with high government regulation and control suffer from price inflation, where you get less and less each year for the same money: healthcare, education, war.
Awesome. The only thing that would make this chart better is seeing the factor of improvement on each stat. The differing units make it harder to eyeball than it could be. Also would be cool if the price was inflation-adjusted.
Excuse me for the digression, but the best thing of this post was to reencounter with Mr. Spinellis blog. I love his books (there's a new one!) and since I ditched RSS readers, I've never more visited it. I advice you to spend some time there.
Could have someone made a microchip in 1957 if they just "knew enough", I mean, if you sent someone back in time to 1957 with today's knowledge, could someone build a microchip from today back then?
Haha. Love this. I just setup my PiZero to run Blockstore this weekend. I'm absolutely amazing by this little machine. Was actually blown away with the speed even though it's 1/2G of RAM. Impressed.