Charting the Rise and Fall of Technology from 1986 to 2007

Nothing makes us appreciate technology like a decades-spanning look at what’s changed since the 1980s. An intrepid pair of researchers named Martin Hilbert and Priscilla Lopez tackled a study to “estimate the world's technological capacity to store, communicate, and compute information, tracking 60 analog and digital technologies during the period from 1986 to 2007.” The results are fascinating, as they chart the rise and fall of analog and highlight some surprising statistics about '80s tech.

Did you know that video game hardware accounted for 9% of the world’s computational capacity back in '86? Crazy!

Hilbert and  Lopez included a variety of media formats in their research, ranging from print to VHS to Blu-Ray. They obviously had to make estimates, but the end result is an interesting look at the computing muscle of 1980s pocket calculators versus today’s smart phones, the storage of the CD versus the LP.

Storage Timeline 

Overall storage grew by an average 23% every year, ending up at 2.9 x 10^20 bytes, or 300 exabytes.

1986: LPs and cassettes account for over 25% of storage. Analog video accounts for over 50%.
1993: Analog video accounts for over 86% of all stored data.
2000: Analog video still holds 70% of all storage in its grasp.
2007: Analog video accounts for only 6% of all storage. Blu-Ray, DVDs and digital tape dominate.

Communication Timeline 

By 2007, two-way communication was handling 65 exabytes of data, while broadcast was handling 2 zettabytes.

1986: 80% of broadcast capacity used on over-the-air signals for TV. Analog phones account for 80% of two-way communication, digital phones 20%.
1993: Digital phones own 67% of two-way communication. Internet accounts for 1% of phone line usage.
2000: Analog telephones account for only 2% of two-way communication. Internet accounts for 50% of phone line usage.
2007: Only 50% of broadcast is terrestrial. Around 25% is digital, while cable is declining. Internet accounts for 97% of phone line usage.

Computation Timeline

1986: Pocket calculators account for 40% of all computational capacity. PCs hold 33%, servers 17%, gaming consoles 9%.
2000: PC rules with 86%. Pocket calculators nowhere to be found. Phones/PDAs occupy 3%.
2007: PC sits around 66%, while gaming consoles climb to 25%. Phones up to 6%.

When it comes to application-specific tech, GPUs are responsible for 97% of our processing power and show an annual growth rate of 86%. We can now perform a combined total 6.4 x 10^18 operations per second. If you listened to this week’s WANG-cast and enjoyed the human brain discussions, you may enjoy this little comparison the researchers threw in at the end: 

“To put our findings in perspective, the 6.4*10^ instructions per second that human kind can carry out on its general-purpose computers in 2007 are in the same ballpark area as the maximum number of nerve impulses executed by one human brain per second."

Feeling like a super genius yet?