How far we have come in technology

Many people say that we have so far with technology over the past few years. Well, they'd be right.

We rarely give it much thought as to how far we have come, but reading an article in a radio magazine describing the comparison between tubes and transistors, I found it incredible just how far we have moved on.

We really don't give it credit in modern society as to the advances in technology.

When looking at the maths, we can start to make detailed comparisons between the two types of technology. Transistors VS Tubes.

The iPhone 11 contains (according to apple) 8.5 billion transistors.If each transistor was a tube, you would have 8,500,000,000 tubes running at approximately 2 watts per tube would be 17,000,000,000 Watts of power. It would weigh 231,200 metric tonnes and that's with more modern, smaller and lightweight tubes than 50 years ago.

The Cray-1 supercomputer released in 1975 weighed 5.5 tons and consumed 115kW. The amazing thing about this machine was that it ran on transistors, not tubes. It had a 64bit processor, ran at 80MHz, 303Mb of storage and 8.3Mb of RAM. It could compute 160 million calculations per second.

That was 1975.

Today the iPhone will run 154 billion calculations per second, has 256GB of storage, 4GB of RAM, consumes around 6 watts of power and weighs 194grams. All in something that can fit in your pocket so that you can play candy crush or whatever the latest fad is‽

So next time you complain about your phone being slow, just remember. Technology has come a very, very long way.