12 Technological Breakthroughs 1970-2021 Togive you a taste of how far ahead IT has gone in a mere 30 years of its existence as compared to hundreds and even thousands of years of existence of other industries, let’s look at the table below which showcases some of the technological breakthroughs in IT and technology over the past 30-50 years. Also please bear in mind that NONE of the things below were existent a mere 60-70 years or so ago other than in fiction books. 1970s* 2021* Improvement over Computing efficiency 1970-2021** Number of watts needed per million instructions per second (Watts per MIPS) 5W per MIPS 0.00001W per MIPS x 500,000 Processing power (Moore’s Law) 2,300 transistors on a 39.5 billion transistors x 17.2M Speed and capability of computers increases every 2 years microprocessor on a microprocessor Computational capacity for supercomputers 124 billion (1993) 442,000 trillion x 3.6M Number of floating-point operations (FLOPS) carried out per second RAM capacity Random-access memory (RAM) - Computer memory typically used to store working data 1-bit 128 Gb x 1.024*10^12 and machine code AL Flash memory 256 Kb 8 Tb x 8×10^9 Non-volatile storage chip can keep stored data and information even when the power is off Generation of semiconductor manufacturing process 20,000 nm 5 nm x 4M Minimum size and spacing for features on each layer of the chip Cost of computers $95,000 for HP 3000 $1,000 x 610 OF PHYGIT Brand-new personal computer costs ($610,000 today) E Hard drive capacity 0.01 GB 20 TB x 2M AT Where all files and folders are physically located Digital camera resolution 10,000 pixels 80,000 megapixels x 8M Camera that captures photographs in digital memory ST Display resolution 160 × 200 pixels 30,720x17,280 pixels x 16.6k Number of horizontal and vertical pixels on a display screen (32K) Internet speed 50 Kbps (1984) 178 terabits per second x 3.2Bn 2021 Rate at which information is transferred from one place on the internet to another 56 Kbps (WWW 1993) (Tbps) (178,000 Gbps) * Our World in Data, 2021 (https://ourworldindata.org/technological-progress) ** LETA Capital estimate