Celebrating tech anniversaries

Seems like computer anniversaries are popping up left and right. Both the 50th anniversary of the disk drive (see Still Spinning After All These Years) and the 25th anniversary of IBM's PC introduction are upon us.

It is clear that both inventions have changed almost every part of our lives. For many of us, it is hard to imagine how we lived before word processors, spreadsheets, email, and ecommerce.

The disk drive took its own path, enabling us to digitally store just about anything. The PC allowed the creation, communication, and interaction with all of that digital content.

Both remain vital technology progress engines but the innovation has taken different tangents. Disk drives have increased in capacity and reduced overall size to where we pocket 60GB or more in our MP3 players. Their overall performance and speed has improved only marginally, and not nearly enough to keep up with the capacity and density increases. So we are actually seeing a decline in disk performance on a per Gigabyte basis.

The PC, with silicon at its roots, no mechanical parts (except the fan), and a more standard architecture than a disk array, has leapt far ahead in terms of performance as measured by Millions of Instructions Per Second (MIPS). Most of this happens within the CPU, the primary chip(s) of the PC that benefit from circuit miniaturization following Moore's Law. CPU power has increased so much that we see installations where customers place multiple virtual machines on any given server just to get the utilization up. But the silicon path of the PC, compared to the magnetic path of the disk, affords equal performance opportunities in memory and networking, both of which have experienced similar order of magnitude improvements over the last couple of decades.

We are seeing PCs and drives deployed in innovative ways every year. For disk storage, some of the most exciting technology is happening in the consumer space with the ability to put much of your digital life in something the size of a matchbook. Can you imagine telling Mozart during his day that, "in the future, you will be able to store, play, and search through every piece of music you have written or played in a tiny box you can hold in your hand?"

On the PC side, the big Internet Data Centers, notably Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo, and eBay, are all built in part on a foundation of cost-effective servers that grew from the PC architecture. It seems hard to quantify the massive impact of these and other companies that are fueled by an efficient technology platform to deliver their software and services.

What's in store for the next round of computer technology anniversaries? We'll have to wait and see.