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.

Gateway · 1991–2000

Gateway 2000 PC

Typical specs shown. Shipped in cow-spotted boxes from South Dakota.

CPUIntel Pentium @ 133 MHz
Memory16 MB
StorageHard disk, CD-ROM
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 512× the memory of the Gateway 2000 PC and a clock 23× faster.

They are 29 years apart. Doubling every two years (Moore's law) would predict about 23,170×; the memory actually grew slower than that. Across the whole catalogue memory doubled every 1.9 years.

Memory16 MB vs 8 GB
Clock speed133 MHz vs 3 GHz

Bars use a logarithmic scale so both machines stay visible.

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