Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Look how far we have come

I was looking at vintage computer advertisements and it made me both nostalgic and amazed at how far technology has come. From having to explain to users what copy and paste did, and how fast electronic mail is most people now have these things in their pocket on a smartphone.

As predicted by Moores Law technology has roughly double in power or put another way more power is increasingly cheaper. So much so that the smartphone in your pocket is considerable more powerful that the computers in these adverts.

My first computer was an Acorn electron it was 8-bit running at 1Mhz and loaded programs from tape. My mobile phone (which itself is a little dated) is a Nexus 4 running a 32-bit processor running 4 cores at 1500Mhz. Incredible really.

However one area which maybe hasn't come so far is design. I recently saw this amazing video on design.
 
Aral Balkan: Superheroes & Villains in Design from Thinking Digital on Vimeo.