As humans, we can adapt to nearly anything. That which used to blow our socks off and set our imaginations ablaze eventually becomes humdrum, as we overlook where we’ve come from to look towards where we’re going. In short, we take things for granted, and nowhere is this as evident as it is within the world of technology.
The smartphone you take with you today is a perfect microcosm of this idea. If we could really appreciate the past, we’d spend hours a day gawking at how incredible it is. Instead, we complain that our real-time map linked to satellite data takes four seconds to load instead of its usual two. So, what happens if we take a step back, smell the roses, and appreciate the long road travelled?
By the Numbers
The best measure of the power of modern smartphones is to compare their specs to the best of what early computer systems had to offer. A good reference point here is demonstrated by FLOPS, or floating point operations per second. We can think of this as the number of arithmetic calculations that a computing system can perform each second. FLOPS matter because computer code is largely based on maths and logic, where more FLOPS means more complex operations can be performed in less time.
Though there is debate over what systems count, it is generally accepted that the first supercomputer was the CDC 6600. Designed by Seymour Cray and manufactured by the Control Data Corporation, this near-room-sized system was released in 1964 at an adjusted cost of USD 23,300,000. Weighing in at a robust 12,000 lbs, the CDC 6600 could hit a maximum of around 3 MFLOPS, or three million floating point operations per second.
An iPhone 15, not the fastest phone on the market, costs around USD 800 and weighs around 171 grams. This means an iPhone 15 costs 29,125 times less than the CDC 6600 while weighing 31,856.7 times less. It also features a hardware power of around 1.79 TFLOPS, or 1.79 trillion floating point operations per second, just shy of 600,000 times more than the CDC 6600.
Of course, it doesn’t stop there. At the time of the CDC 6600, mobile phones didn’t yet exist, let alone the internet or any kind of high-speed wired or satellite connectivity. This means that for an illustration of connection speeds, we could jump to the late 1990s when the 56k dial-up modem was king.
This screaming little box could download data at a maximum of 56 Kbps, which was then a huge step up from the former 14.4 Kbps offerings. Jumping forward to the modern day, we can again use the iPhone 15’s 5G connectivity as a measuring point, which can achieve speeds of 1 Gbps. Downloading a one-gigabyte file on a 56k hardwired modem would take around 42.5 hours at full speed, while a 1 gigabit 5G connection could manage the same transfer in less than 10 seconds.
Points of Reference
For a direct reference of how much has changed, we could look at common uses today, and how easy and streamlined they are compared to what would be necessary in the past. For this, we won’t even consider the most demanding uses of mobile technology, instead, let’s explore a more typical use case like playing online casino games. Playing online casino games is separated into several different sections, like browsing websites, placing a deposit, and playing games.
Casino websites load minutes faster than in the 1990s, and at a far higher level of detail. The game selection in titles like Zoom Roulette and Dragon Roulette loads in seconds, with more colour and detail than anything available on the old internet and computers. That is to say nothing of the inherent advantages of convenience that online casinos produce, such as eliminating travel times to physical casinos and the complete lack of a dress code. All of these benefits, make enjoying roulette casino games easier and more accessible than ever before.
Even with all these leaps and examples we haven’t covered all the important hardware upgrades like storage capacity, read/write speed, and developments in RAM. Suffice to say, each of these has seen upgrades on a similarly absurd level to what we’ve experienced with FLOP development and internet speed growth.
While you might not appreciate the power of a modern smartphone any more than you admire the measuring prowess of the average ruler, sometimes there’s something to be gained by looking back. As much as we’ve been programmed to only look for the next hot thing, remember you’re holding something right now that previous generations would have gone to war for. You’re carrying a supercomputer, and you’re not even financially ruined by its cost or crushed under its weight.
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