The Trends of Today

Computers and Moore's Law 

In order to understand today's technological trends, it helps to take a look at how they have developed over the years. Even in education, computers have a long history. For example, the ENIAC, built at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering between 1944 and 1946, was the first large-scale general-purpose electronic computer (Goldschmidt & Akera, 1998). It weighed 30-tons, contained 19,000 vacuum tubes, 1,500 relays, and consumed almost 200 kilowatts of electrical power (Weik, 1961). Designed to calculate trajectory tables for new guns, the ENIAC failed on an average of every seven minutes, but when it worked it could compute 10-digit multiplication in 3/1000th of a second -- a huge accomplishment for its day (Jukes & McCain, 1997). More recently, the 1980 model Cray supercomputer was the fastest machine of its day. It cost $12 million, weighed five tons, and consumed 150kW of electricity -- all this and it had only 8MB of RAM and operated at speed of 80 MHz (Jukes & McCain, 1997). By comparison, a used computer today with the same capabilities can be purchased for under $300.