So, this little beauty is the new Raspberry Pi 400 computer, it costs around £90 and is powerful enough to act as a fully fledged PC for educational or hobbyist purposes. I remember back in 1982 buying another British computer, it was the Sinclair ZX Spectrum and it cost me £125 (see picture below) I remember being thrilled at the performance and the capabilities of this little machine, a proper programmable computer which was almost certainly responsible for helping to launch my career ever since.
I thought it would be interesting to look at the relative capabilities of these two machines to see how much things have progressed in 38 years so I created a little table (see below) showing the various capabilities of both machines and the factor increase in performance.
Amazingly things like processing power (i.e. the number of instructions executed per second) had increase by around 2,000 times and memory capacity by over 4 million times. I think it's pretty amazing that our collective ingenuity has created a device that's many thousands of times more powerful and still cheaper by 30% nearly forty years on, and that's not even adjusted for inflation which would make it around a quarter of the price of the 1982 machine, bravo the computer industry!
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