It might be an extreme comparison, and even throw up a paradox, but it’s instructive four our purposes here. My first utility car, was handed down to me by my parents in 1972 after I got my licence. It had a top speed of 95 km (59 miles) an hour. The most recent model of the same car, in its basic version, can do 160 km (99 miles) an hour. Exactly 35 years, and a 68% improvement in speed, separate the two cars. Of course, it’s not high speeds that the engineers in Turin have been putting all their efforts into over the years. But it does give you an idea of the progress they’ve made. Now, let’s take a computer made 35 years ago, in 1985, like the one plonked down in front of me that very year at the publishing company where I worked. It did incredible things, things I couldn’t dream of a Lettera 32 doing. It wrote on the screen instead of paper. It let me delete, cut and paste and, best of all, send files off to the press, instead of a piece of paper whose contents then had to be typed up on a phototypesetting machine (and before that a linotype). Obviously, it was a PC, not a calculation centre, but the analogy works. That machine worked at the extraordinary speed of 8 million operations per second. But the computer I’m using now, to type this story of the massive leaps in capacity made by the latest computing systems, has a 2.5 GHz clock, meaning it can do 2.5 billion operations a second. Times that by eight, the number of cores in its processor, and you’re looking at 20 billion operations a second. In 35 years, the computers used every day in publishing have seen their calculation power multiply by 2,500, and that’s without taking into account the processing ability of their screens. If you will allow me a foray into the absurd, that’s like the next Fiat 500 coming out with a speed of more than 66 km (41 miles), not per hour but per second.
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