From 18,000 vacuum tubes drawing 150kW to neural clusters executing 10²⁰ operations per second — the story of how humanity built its digital nervous system, one transistor at a time.
A logarithmic view of transistor (and vacuum tube equivalent) counts across landmark chips from 1945 to 2024. Each dot represents a real chip. The slope of this line is the story of the modern world.
Thirty-two pivotal events across hardware, software, networking, and AI that defined the trajectory of global compute.
Peak FLOPS of the world's most powerful machines, from ENIAC through the exascale era. One exaFLOP = 10¹⁸ operations per second — roughly equivalent to every human doing 130 million calculations simultaneously.
Gordon Moore's 1965 observation — transistor counts doubling every ~2 years — held remarkably true for 50 years. Since ~2015, the curve has bent. Physics has started saying no.
From room-filling behemoths to chips smaller than a fingernail — the computers that defined their era.
Six distinct eras, each defined by a dominant architecture, use-case, and culture that shaped how humans relate to computers.