History: IT Of The Past

Technological capacity and growth
Hilbert and Lopez identify the exponential pace of technological change (a kind of Moore's law): machines’ application-specific capacity to compute information per capita has roughly doubled every 14 months between 1986-2007; the per capita capacity of the world’s general-purpose computers has doubled every 18 months during the same two decades; the global telecommunication capacity per capita doubled every 34 months; the world’s storage capacity per capita required roughly 40 months to double (every 3 years); and per capita broadcast information has doubled roughly every 12.3 years.