The Pace of Technology Change in Computing

Don Lyle

A review of progress made in digital computing since I began in the field in 1958.

The change in CPUs was discussed comparing the 1956-vintage IBM 650 to today’s digital assistants and to the Intel Pentium IV and AMD’s 255-million transistor Athlon 64.

The changes in memory technology was reviewed from the 650’s 2000 words of rotating drum memory to a current day IBM die containing 62 Mbits of information.

Changes in disk technology were discussed from IBM’s bigger-than-two-refrigerator sized RAMAC at 5 Mbytes to today’s microdrives containing 4 GBytes and 3-1/2 inch drives containing 500GBytes.

Finally, a “state-of-the-art” demonstration was given of Sony’s current AI offering, the Aibo (pictured).