For me, starting with 1978 hand soldered NASCOM-1 kit (2MHz Z80, 1KB RAM for user, 1KB for display) to my current hand built 10-year old tower with a core i7-5930K processor.
2MHz 8-bit -> 3.5GHz 64-bit multi-core CPU
1KB -> 32GB RAM (a factor of 32 million times more memory !!)
offline -> 9600 baud BBS -> 1Gbps fiber + internet
From hand assembling on paper (or just entering memorized hex opcodes directly into memory) to vibe coding "build me an app to do xxx", or talking to Gemini on my iPhone (would have looked like an alien artifact in 1978) asking it pretty much anything.
What will the next 50 years bring? Will it be as amazing as NASCOM-1 -> iPhone + Gemini? I used to think so, and certainly in 50 years I'd expect full-blown human-level AGI to be here, but will it feel that much different ?
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For me, starting with 1978 hand soldered NASCOM-1 kit (2MHz Z80, 1KB RAM for user, 1KB for display) to my current hand built 10-year old tower with a core i7-5930K processor.
2MHz 8-bit -> 3.5GHz 64-bit multi-core CPU
1KB -> 32GB RAM (a factor of 32 million times more memory !!)
audio casette storage -> 4TB HDD
16x48 char display -> GTX 980 Ti 2560x1600 gfx (+ 6 TFLOPs)
offline -> 9600 baud BBS -> 1Gbps fiber + internet
From hand assembling on paper (or just entering memorized hex opcodes directly into memory) to vibe coding "build me an app to do xxx", or talking to Gemini on my iPhone (would have looked like an alien artifact in 1978) asking it pretty much anything.
What will the next 50 years bring? Will it be as amazing as NASCOM-1 -> iPhone + Gemini? I used to think so, and certainly in 50 years I'd expect full-blown human-level AGI to be here, but will it feel that much different ?