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.

Compaq · 1983

Compaq Portable

A 28-pound "luggable" and one of the first fully IBM-compatible clones.

CPUIntel 8088 @ 4.77 MHz
Memory128 KB
Storage5.25" floppy
Launch price$2,995 ≈ $9,430 today
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 65,536× the memory of the Compaq Portable and a clock 629× faster.

They are 42 years apart. Doubling every two years (Moore's law) would predict about 2.1 million×; the memory actually grew slower than that. Across the whole catalogue memory doubled every 1.9 years.

Memory128 KB vs 8 GB
Clock speed4.77 MHz vs 3 GHz

Bars use a logarithmic scale so both machines stay visible.

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