Moore’s Law as Illustrated using Blowtorches and Calculators
The $100 calculator from 1972 shown in this video would have actually cost the equivalent of $525 in 2010 dollars due to inflation.
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In 1972, my dad bought this four function calculator for $100.
Today we can buy a little four function calculator with the same capabilities for just $1.
Moore’s Law is the adage that the number of transistors that can be put on a single microchip doubles every two years. Because computers are limited to a fraction of the speed of light, the smaller and denser we can make computer chips, the more powerful and capable computers can become. However, another benefit is that computers and digital devices continually get smaller and cheaper, like our calculator.
Instead of talking about computers that get increasingly more powerful, let’s look at a simple device that has instead become much smaller and cheaper, yet it still has the same functionality it did forty years ago when it sold for 100 times the current price.
If we take apart this calculator, we see that it has a few simple components. There is a keypad, an LCD screen, a solar panel, and a circuit board.
The circuit board has a small battery on it for when the solar panel isn’t providing enough power.
The circuit board also has this black blob of what looks like epoxy. Underneath this blob is the small microchip brain of the computer, which combines the functions we see in full size computers such as RAM, Random Access Memory or the short term memory of the computer; a CPU, the Central Processing Unit that performs calculations; and ROM, Read Only Memory that stores permanent instructions.
By heating this epoxy-like blob, I can get access to the actual chip.
As I work in the freeing the chip, you can see that the melted material is sticking to my tools.
So this is how far we have come in forty years. What will the next forty years bring?
Here is the same model of calculator again being disassembled by a blowtorch.