The 1980’s were a time of massive technological advancements, and one of the most important was the development of supercomputers. The first supercomputer was developed in 1981 by Seymour Cray, founder of Cray Research Inc., which went on to produce several other models that dominated their respective categories for decades. But what does a smartphone comparison to 80’s supercomputer mean?
Size
A 1980s supercomputer was a behemoth, taking up entire rooms. The original Cray-1, for example, was 10 feet (3 meters) tall and weighed over 1 ton. A modern smartphone is about a foot long and weighs 4 ounces (110 grams). The most powerful supercomputers today are still room-sized systems that weigh thousands of pounds and use tens of megawatts of power.
Adobe Acrobat experts say, “By 1985, the supercomputer CRAY-2 had become the quickest and most powerful machine ever made.”
Speed
If you’re reading this article, you have a smartphone. And if you have a smartphone, it’s connected to the internet. And if that’s true, then the first thing you’ll notice is how fast the internet is: compared to what it was like in 1988, your phone is way faster now—it can communicate with other devices at speeds up to 1 gigahertz or more.
But what exactly does this mean? What does “1 gigahertz” even look like? Well, if they were talking about human-made objects like computers, then 10^15 Hz would be a really high number (the same goes for kilobytes/megabytes/gigabytes).
Power Consumption And Heat Output
The more power something uses, the hotter it gets. This is especially true with computers because they have so many components crammed into small spaces—the more components you cram into a computer case (or chassis), the hotter it will get inside there due to friction from all those parts rubbing against each other as well as your hand when you touch them after touching something cold like water or ice cream (don’t forget about condensation).
Storage (RAM, ROM and other media)
Storage is another area where the 1980s supercomputer is lacking. The mainframe had no storage at all, and even if it did have some sort of RAM or ROM, it would be very small compared to what you use today. On the other hand, a modern smartphone has a good amount of storage space (depending on whether you’re using an iPhone or Galaxy device). And while it doesn’t have as much RAM as the supercomputer—which would have been measured in megabytes rather than gigabytes—it comes with much more power overall.
Programming
Programming is the art of writing programs. A program is a list of instructions, or commands, that tell a computer what to do. For example, you might write an app that tells your phone to take a picture and email it to your mother.
The first computers were programmed using punch cards and paper tape—you’d have to feed your code into the machine one line at a time. Later, they were programmed by punching holes in magnetic tape or flipping switches on circuit boards (called “assemblers”). Today many people write code using text editors like Notepad or Visual Studio Code instead of punching holes in tapes (or even pressing buttons). The good news is that this means you don’t need super-strong fingers!
In conclusion, you’ve seen that the 1980s supercomputer is much more powerful than a modern smartphone. However, it is also much slower and uses more electricity. This makes sense, given how much progress has been made in computer technology since then!
