Head to head

Compare any two computers

Pick two machines from 50 years of computing, or pit one against the phone in your pocket. Every number comes from the atlas catalogue.

Acorn · 1981

BBC Micro Model B

Made for the BBC Computer Literacy Project and found in almost every British school.

CPUMOS 6502 @ 2 MHz
Memory32 KB
StorageCassette, 5.25" floppy
Launch price£335
In the atlasBe the first to add it
VS

Various · 2025

A 2025 flagship phone

The computer most people now carry.

CPU8-core ARM @ 3 GHz
Memory8 GB
Storage256 GB flash

The verdict

The A 2025 flagship phone has 262,144× the memory of the BBC Micro Model B and a clock 1,500× faster.

They are 44 years apart. Doubling every two years (Moore's law) would predict about 4.2 million×; the memory actually grew slower than that. Across the whole catalogue memory doubled every 1.9 years.

Memory32 KB vs 8 GB
Clock speed2 MHz vs 3 GHz

Bars use a logarithmic scale so both machines stay visible.

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