Super Chip

At the turn of the millennium, broadband internet was becoming more popular than dialup. A question I asked myself was why would you need an internet connection that persists all day everyday. Now the world has changed, all the TV I watch, all the radio I listen to, all the phone calls I make and almost everything I read comes to me through the internet. Even this blog I am writing now is being sent through the internet.  I have a Roku stick and a Chromecast stick, two devices that make my TV smart and are powered by the TV. Then it dawned on me, when I was a child, those two devices would be considered super computers. To match the power I would need a large cabinet full of circuit boards and cooling fans. If you take off the protective casing of a Chromecast stick and remove the heat sink, you are left with a machine the size of a stamp, let that sink into your mind for a minute. 

I watched a video of a man running emulators on his Chromecast stick with Android TV 10. He ran emulators for every major console from the 90s. He played 80s Nintendo (NES), Super Nintendo, Sega Mega Drive, all the game boys, Atari Jaguar, PlayStation one. A small microchip the size of a stamp matched the computing power of all the great games consoles that were popular in the 90s. The device uses just 12 volts of direct current, less than 5 amps of power. It is a system on a chip. A whole computer system on a microscopic circuit that is mass produced so quickly that it costs less than £5 to make. They sell it for around £30. To me that is amazing because I have perspective, my son's generation may not find that amazing, even my own age group may not but I do because I understand what has happened. 

Entire computer systems are now made on a single micro chip, graphics, sounds,  software, input, everything on just one little chip that is the size of a stamp and it has no moving parts.