In July of 1969 when Buzz Aldrin went to the moon aboard the Apollo 11, he carried along his trusty Pickett N600-ES slide rule. Back then you could purchase this calculating device for $10.95. A typical blue-collar worker was earning around $3.72 per hour, so it took 2.94 hours to earn the money to buy a tool that would let you do about one calculation per second.
Today you can have an Xbox Series X for $832 dollars. Blue-collar compensation is now around $32.54 per hour, so it takes 25.6 hours to earn the money to buy one.
The graphical processing unit (GPU) in the Xbox device runs at 12 teraflops. A teraflop is one trillion floating-point operations per second.
For the time it took to work to buy a device in 1969 that could do one calculation you will get 1,423,941,532,258 calculations today.
Moore’s law suggests a doubling every two years. The slide rule to Xbox rate indicates a rate of doubling every 15 months, or an increase of around 71 percent a year for the last 52 years.
Learning Curves grow knowledge and wealth is knowledge. Let 7.8 billion learning curves bloom.