The Changing Technology

One of the hardest things for most people to understand is the compound effect of the exponential rate of improvement of information technology. For the last four decades, both the speed and the storage capacity of computers have doubled every eighteen to twenty-four months; the cost size and poser consumption have become smaller at about the same rate. The bandwidth of computer networkds has increased at an even faster rate (a thousandfold in just the last decade), and the traffic on the (Internet continues to double every one hundred days. For the foreseeable future, all of these trends will continue; the basic technology to support them exists now.

William A. Wulf, Higher Education Alert: The Information Railroad is Coming, EDUCAUSE Review, January/February 2003, p.14