In 1876, at the age of 29, Alexander Graham Bell invented the first telephone. It took until 1984 for the invention of the first portable cellular phone. The first commercially produced cell phone, the Motorola DunaTAC 8000X, sold for $3,995 – equivalent to nearly $12,000 today.
How things have changed in the last forty years! In order to match the power of an iPhone 12, a 1985 Cray-2 supercomputer would have to be scaled up and would require a floor space of about 80,000 square feet, the equivalent of about sixty, two-bedroom homes. In other words, an iPhone 12 would be about 5,000 times faster than the so-called supercomputer of 1985.
Sources: World Magazine, October 21, 2023, p. 15. “Fast-forward — comparing a 1980s supercomputer to the modern smartphone,” Adobe Blog (blog.adobe.com), 11/08/2022, accessed 2/20/2024.
