A boy sits in his room on a lonely night in April, slaving before the glow of his computer screen. His only goal? To finish his homework. The clock shows only an hour until midnight, and the glare from the screen is beginning to make his eyes dry. His computer is only a year old, made in 2012. It is an Alienware M14x, made by the Dell company primarily for gaming. For his purposes, however, the boy only has one program open: an internet browser that is able to look across the sum of human knowledge and imagination and bring it into the dark confines of his bedroom.
His computer can do other things, too. Besides running and storing multiple games that take up nearly 12 gigabytes of memory, this computer plays films that it streams from the internet. It stores and plays back nearly 16 gigabytes of music. It even enables its user to grab hold of the spinning nothing that crowds his mind with its possibilities, its intrigue, and its sheer emotion, and give it form through the written word while keeping up with its speed.
This computer was the base of the M14x model. For $1200, it has 4 gigabytes of RAM and almost 700 gigabytes of storage memory. Its core functions at 2.4 gigahertz. That amounts to 2,400,000,000 calculations performed every second. And all of this functionality in a computer that this student can carry around in his bag.
This is not the only computing power this student carries around with him, though. Another device is nearly the size of a large playing card, and yet it can still display razor-sharp images, store the aforementioned 16 gigabytes of music, and connect, without wires, to the internet's storage of information and imagination and back to computers in infinite combinations.
These infinite combinations are the personal computers in circulation today. It was not always this way, and it never will be again. The face of computers is always changing, always improving. Moore's law says that the processing power of computers will double every two years. Well, these numbers are now so large that it is near impossible to keep up with this prediction.
