Fast IT Facts

1. Today, more information can be sent over a single cable in one second than was sent in one month over the entire Internet in 1997.
2. This year, for the first time, tube televisions will sell fewer units than flat panel displays. Computer CRT screens are following the same trend, falling from an estimated 14.4 million units in 2006 to 10 million in 2007. The number is expected to fall sharply.
3. In the mid-1980's, it was predicted that by 2000 there would be 900,000 mobile phones worldwide. That year came and there were 900,000 phones sold every 19 hours!
4. This year there will be 200 million new PC’s sold, and 800 Million new mobile phones.
5. The CPU in the first IBM PC, the Intel 8088, ran at 4.77 Megahertz and contained 29,000 transistors. The current Intel CPU, the Core 2 Duo, runs at 3.0 Gigahertz and contains 291 Million transistors.
6. The world’s fastest computer has its speed measured in petaflops, which is 1,000 trillion calculations per second (flops are Floating Point Operations).
7. The year 2006 saw the demise of the VHS video tape. In less than 30 years, this format went from introduction, to widespread acceptance, to being replaced by the DVD format. It is already difficult to find VHS tapes for sale anywhere other than remainder bins or dollar stores.
8. Along the same lines, on January 29, 2007, the British computer retail chain PC World issued a statement saying that only 2% of the computers that they sold contained a built-in floppy disk drive and, once present stocks were exhausted, no more floppies would be sold.
9. You can now buy a terabyte hard drive for your home for under $250. Hard drive maker Seagate said recently that they expect to market a 300 terabyte drive by 2012. As a point of reference, we currently run our entire company on well under 100 terabytes. Ten years ago we did it with less than one terabyte.
10. OLED TV's are the next big thing. Sony has these in development. The screens are 4 mm thick! They are thin enough to slide under a door. Good HD TV's have a 2500:1 contrast ratio as a measure of screen sharpness. State of the art TV’s run about 10,000:1. These new systems clock in with an incredible 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio.
11. As of January 11, 2007, 1.093 billion people use the Internet according to Internet World Stats.
12. Spam now accounts for 85-90% of the inbound email messages we receive.
13. Ink Jet ink costs an astonishing $1,500 per liter!