The 10-20-30 Year Rule Of Computing

This observation was first made about 15 years ago:

Computerized devices we use are in spirit, equivalent to desktop computers of either 10, 20, or 30 years ago depending on the device.

10 Years Ago

Think about what your desktop computer was 10 years ago and what it was capable of doing. Now think about your cell phone or tablet. They follow the 10-year rule which is to say that they are roughly equivalent to a desktop computer of 10 years ago. The 2004-era smart phone, for instance, kinda looked and felt like Windows 3.1 running on say, an early Pentium. The smartphone equivalent devices of 1999, Palm Pilot PDAs, were about as capable as say, a classic 80s era Macintosh.

Not convinced? Let's take the first iPhone, introduced in 2007. It had a 412Mhz processor, 128MB of RAM and came in 4, 8, or 16GB flash. In 1997, from the same company you could get a PowerMac G3 with a 333Mhz processor, 128MB of RAM and a 4, 6, 8, or 9GB hard drive.

Let's jump 5 years to 2012. The iPhone 5 came out with a 1.3Ghz processor, 16-64GB memory and 1GB RAM. The G4, released in 2002, came with a 1GHz processor (early 2003), 60GB hard drive, and ok, only 256MB of RAM (expandable to 1GB).

That's the 10 year curve at work. But wait, there's 2 more!

20 Years Ago

20-year lead devices are mostly appliances. Smart TVs, automobile entertainment systems, ATMs, kiosks, self-checkout machines, the credit card machine on the pump at the gas station, etc. They started getting higher density displays, full color, complex graphical menus, and video about 20 years after desktops did. If you think back to the ATMs of the mid 2000s they were blue screens with usually 4 buttons on either side and some green text. They felt and looked like a DOS interface from the mid 80s.

If you've ever been lucky enough to see a PoS terminal at the super-market reboot you'll see they mostly run Linux and if you catch a glimpse of the CPU during the bootup it's on the order of a few hundred Mhz and the box has about 128MB of RAM, which fits the timeline.

For another example, think about car stereos from the 90s; they had at most, an 8 character display and a modal button or more likely, certain sections of the display reserved for certain functions. If you put a CD in, what was equivalently, the CD indicator light (usually an icon) would toggle on, and then there'd be a simple counter that would tell you the track number. Things started getting more complex in the late 90s and early 2000s for car stereos - about the 20 year mark of the TRS, TI, Apple, and Commodore computers.

30 Years Ago

When this observation was first made, 30 year devices were border-line hypothetical. At the time I predicted that there'd be LCD screens in elevators (happened), computerized billboards (happened), and touch-screen laundry mats (haven't seen one yet). The touch-screen laundry mat would involve a centralized payment kiosk where you enter a machine number and swipe a credit card. The machine stays locked until the credit card unlocks it. That didn't happen, but the parking meter equivalent did.

Anyway, 30-year lead devices are ones with effectively "disposable" interfaces. Think microwaves, refrigerators, greeting cards, vending machines or other commodity devices that are designed to be cheaply made, mass produced, and potentially tossed away. Some of these just started getting interfaces or digitized a few years ago, at coincidentally, about the 30 year anniversary of the home computer. They are just starting to be customizable in a persistent way and just starting to engage with the world (think Nest) - just as, say, computers were beginning to get networked 30 years ago. They have limited storage capacity and usually aren't reprogammable.

Look at the modern soda-dispensing machine for instance. A few years ago, at about the 30th anniversary of the home computer, they started becoming digitized. These days there's multi-leveled touch screens for soda selection. It wouldn't surprise me if you could upgrade the software by swapping out SD cards - the modern floppy disc.

40 Years Ago?

Do these devices exist? If they do, the theory goes that we will start seeing them in the next 5-10 years. They'd have to be cheaper things like say a coffee mug with a digital display or a pair of shoes powered by springs and footsteps that also measure how much you walk and sends it out via bluetooth or perhaps a mattress that monitors how you sleep, a pair of headphones that has a ring-buffer of the past few minutes of audio that you can review at an arbitrary time or a showerhead that modulates the amount of water based on your duration ... if the rule holds that is.

Will we see 50, 60, or 70 year devices? Only time will tell.

Thanks for reading.