Not really looking for an answer here, but wanted to get into some wild speculation. See, back in 1st edition, FASA had
tried to give technical stats on decks and such (although, they did use the nebulous "megapulses" measurement), but even in the short time between 1st and 2nd edition, the I/O speeds they thought were 50 years down the road turned out to be about 5 years...
[If Slamm-0! were around, he'd tell you damn brats to gather 'round as FastJack reminiscences about ancient history.]
See, the thing you gotta really remind yourself on a daily basis is just how far we've come already.
In 1945, ENIAC was the first general purpose computer (computers built prior were always specific to a single purpose). It had twenty accumulators, which each could store one 10 digit decimal number.
When Apollo 11 landed on the moon in 1969, they did so with help from their on-board computer. It weight 30 kg (66 lbs), had over 5,000 circuits, 74 kilobytes in hard-coded memory, only about 4 kilobyte in a "RAM"-like memory and cost $150,000.
Silicon-based RAM chips began to make computers faster and more affordable. In the 70s, the first personal computers showed up in the commercial market. Intel was integral in the design of the chips of these PCs which, in the beginning of the decade, had 8 bit microprocessors and sold for about $1000-$1500 each (monotone screen and keyboard included).
1977 was special in that it introduced us to the "next generation" of PCs by companies that would become synonymous with personal computers for the next decade: Commodore's PET, the Apple IIe and, the box I learned BASIC on, the TRS-80. External drives were more frequently used, mostly cassette tapes (these would soon be replaced by the 5.25" floppies). They all had about 4 Kb of memory on-board and the IIe was on the high-end of prices at around $500*.
The next big step happened in 1981 when IBM released their first PC. Enter a certain William Henry Gates III, who wrote an updated BASIC programming language which wound up being called PC-DOS. Apple also used a version called, ironically enough, MS-DOS.
With the big boys now in the picture, the era of the
Pirates of Silicon Valley had begun. When Steve Wozniak had created the first Apple computer, he was working at Hewlett-Packard and had a clause in his contract that anything he created they had creative rights to, unless they signed off on those rights. In one of those classic blunders that resound through history, Steve's boss at HP was credited as saying something akin to "The public doesn't
want computers in their house" and Woz & Jobs were able to start Apple computers.
Flash forward to 1983. Apple creates the first Graphical User Interface to be used on a PC -- the Lisa. Unfortunately, the interface cost over $10,000** at the time and sales on it were a little slow (to say the least). Jobs then focused his attention on the Apple MacIntosh, using bits and pieces of Lisa, he create the first PC with mouse/GUI interface. Then, the summer of 85, Gates released Windows 1.0 on the world.
Now, the first Macs were $2,500 and had about 128 Kb of RAM. Within a year, the PC clones flooded the market, selling at just under $1000 and and birthed the 32-bit systems.
I could go into greater detail on the memories of the PCs during this era, but it was staggering how quickly things changed. The first PC I bought (around 1998) cost me over $3000 because it was extremely high-end (we had just started creeping into the Megabit memories--it was still common practice to save everything on 3.5" floppies to free up memory on the PC). But when I try to think back of all that had changed back then, I get dizzy. We went from PCs that relied on external storage devices (3.5" disks, CD-ROMs, Iomega zip drives) to save most of our data and only installing one game at a time on your PC--because two games made it run slow to the end of the millennium when internal memory finally made it possible to store all your music collection on the PC. We also did some serious jumping in the ownerships of computers. In 1997, only 18% (1 out of 5) households had a PC. Four years later, 50% of the public had a computer in their house. 2007, it's jumped to 81% (4 out of 5).
So, excuse me if I gloss over the capabilities of computers during those years.
Anyway, the point of all this is this: You 16 Gb iPod Nano that you bought for $180? It has the equivalent of 226,719 Apollo Landing Modules, while costing 0.0002% of the inflation-adjusted price and weighing 7/10,000 of the original computer.
So, next time you hear a player complain that an AI couldn't possibly fit on a Commlink, slap him in the back of the head.
*Inflation quiz: How much would $500 in 1977 be worth in 2009? About $1749.77. So shut it about "Wow, computers were pretty cheap back then!"
**$21,259.32 in 2009 terms