As illustrated in figure 2.8, computation keeps getting half as expensive roughly every couple of years, and this trend has now persisted for over a century, cutting the computer cost a whopping million million million (1018) times since my grandmothers were born. If everything got a million million million times cheaper, then a hundredth of a cent would enable you to buy all goods and services produced on Earth this year. This dramatic drop in costs is of course a key reason why computation is everywhere these days, having spread from the building-sized computing facilities of yesteryear into
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