The effects of innovation are not always appreciated until you look back deep into the past, all the way back to 1991, when I had hair (well, most of it). One of my favorite YouTube videosis a satire pilot episode of the television series 24 where Jack Bauer has to use dial-up.

A local writer in Buffalo, NY found a 1991 Radio Shack ad and realized his iPhone could do all of the things that 13 of 15 separate gadgets could do for $5100 in a package that weighs less than 4 ounces and sells a tenth of the cost or less. The only thing the iPhone could not do was serve as a radar detector or include a 15” woofer. There are some things that there's not an app for, I guess.

Early in my WhatTheyThink writings I estimated that an IBM Selectric typewriter, which sold for $750 in the mid-1970s would cost in the range of $2750. For $750 today you could buy a very nice desktop computer or a nice-featured notebook computer that obviously does so much more, and a printer. These give us a window about about how much technology has changed in terms of its costs. 

Based on the computer technologies of the time, an iPhone in 1991 would have cost $3.5 million. The memory alone is a cost marvel. In 1991, 1GB of flash memory was $45,000. Today, it's 55 cents. An iPhone with 32GB has more than $1.4 million of 1991 memory in it.

This year is the 50th anniversary of Moore's Law (Intel has a website commemorating it). Billions of people now have what would have passed as a supercomputer decades ago in their pockets. Costs are such that these computers are practically free in today's terms, in comparison. Innovation effects are hard to account for in the wealth of nations and their peoples as anyone with a smartphone today needed to be a multi-millionaire to have one 25 years ago.