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.

NEC · 1982

NEC PC-9801

The PC-98 family dominated Japanese offices and homes until the late 1990s.

CPUNEC V30 / Intel 8086 @ 5 MHz
Memory128 KB
Storage5.25" / 8" floppy
Launch price¥298,000
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 NEC PC-9801 and a clock 600× faster.

They are 43 years apart. Doubling every two years (Moore's law) would predict about 3 million×; the memory actually grew slower than that. Across the whole catalogue memory doubled every 1.9 years.

Memory128 KB vs 8 GB
Clock speed5 MHz vs 3 GHz

Bars use a logarithmic scale so both machines stay visible.

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