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.

Computer A

Computer B

Generic PC · 1985–1990

A 286 PC with MS-DOS

Typical specs shown. Games ran in DOS and you learned to type cd and dir.

CPU	Intel 80286 @ 12 MHz
Memory	1 MB
Storage	20 MB hard disk, floppy
In the atlas	Be the first to add it

Various · 2025

A 2025 flagship phone

The computer most people now carry.

CPU	8-core ARM @ 3 GHz
Memory	8 GB
Storage	256 GB flash

The verdict

The A 2025 flagship phone has 8,192× the memory of the A 286 PC with MS-DOS and a clock 250× faster.

They are 38 years apart. Doubling every two years (Moore's law) would predict about 524,288×; the memory actually grew slower than that. Across the whole catalogue memory doubled every 1.9 years.

Memory1 MB vs 8 GB

Clock speed12 MHz vs 3 GHz

Bars use a logarithmic scale so both machines stay visible.

Popular match-ups

Commodore 64 vs Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K Apple II vs Apple MacBook Air (M1, 2020)Amiga 500 vs Atari 520ST IBM PC (5150) vs A PC or laptop with Windows 11 Apple iMac G3 vs Apple MacBook Air (M1, 2020)BBC Micro Model B vs Raspberry Pi (Model B)Altair 8800 vs Phone Asus Eee PC 701 vs A school Chromebook