💻 From a room-sized computer to a smartphone in your pocket. How did we get here?
Branch Education released an epic video covering 80 years of computer evolution. It goes beyond transistors and Moore’s Law to explore the 8 major technological leaps that changed everything.
🕰️ The 8 ages of evolution:
- Transistorization (late 1940s): vacuum tubes replaced
- Transistor packaging: room-sized mainframes
- The integrated circuit: everything on one chip
- The first CPU: Intel 4004 (1971)
- The frequency era: MHz → GHz
- The mobile revolution: ARM and energy efficiency
- Multicore processors: parallelism
- AI processors: NPUs and accelerators
📊 One number to put it in perspective: The Apollo Guidance Computer had ~4,000 transistors. The Apple M4 has ~28,000,000,000 transistors. That’s 7 million times more. In 55 years.
💡 Explanation in a nutshell#
The evolution of computers wasn’t linear — it came in discontinuous leaps each time a new technology arrived. First the transistor (replaced vacuum tubes), then the integrated circuit (packed thousands onto a chip), then the CPU (one chip that does everything). Today the leap is toward AI-specialized processors. Each era was possible because the previous one hit its physical limits.
More information at the link 👇
