Wrath of Lamb June 14/10

In 1951, ``Univac,'' the world's first commercial computer, was unveiled. Boy, have we ever come a long way. 'Univac' stood for 'UNIVersal Automatic Computer' The UNIVAC I used 5,200 vacuum tubes, weighed 13 metric tons, consumed 125 kW, and could perform about 1,905 operations per second running on a 2.25 MHz clock. The complete system occupied more than 35.5 m² of floor space. Unbelievable. The first computer I ever remember seeing was the Commodore VIC-20. That was the first compuer to sell more than a million units. It came with 5 KB of RAM. Five. Kilo. Bytes. It was soon surpassed by the Commodore 64, which had, you guessed it... 64 kilobytes of RAM. My wife and I recently bought a new i-Mac. It has 8 gigabytes of RAM. The first computer, the UNIVAC, would take up our entire house. Now our computer, which takes up the space of a few books, can do the job of about a million UNIVACS.

What a world.