Computers
The first electronic computer filled an entire building and could perform a few thousand calculations per second. The Raspberry Pi Zero 2W running AwareCub is smaller than a credit card and performs billions. That change happened in 80 years.
ENIAC and the beginning
The first general-purpose electronic computer — ENIAC — was completed in 1945. It weighed 27 tonnes, used 18,000 vacuum tubes, consumed 150 kilowatts of power, and could perform about 5,000 calculations per second. It was a marvel of engineering. It couldn't run a modern calculator app.
Moore's Law
In 1965, Gordon Moore observed that the number of transistors on a chip doubled roughly every two years while cost stayed constant. Moore's Law held for over 50 years — producing an exponential improvement in computing power that no other technology in human history has matched. It's the reason a £20 Raspberry Pi is more powerful than the computers that guided the Apollo missions.
The internet changes everything
The internet began as ARPANET in 1969 — a US military network connecting four universities. By the 1990s it was public. By 2000 it was essential. By 2010 it was in everyone's pocket. The internet did not just connect computers — it connected human knowledge, creating a shared, searchable, instantly accessible repository of almost everything humanity has ever written, recorded, or calculated.
AwareCub: 13.8 billion years to a credit card
AwareCub runs on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W — a complete computer the size of a credit card, costing less than £20, powered by a USB cable. It processes voice commands, runs local AI speech synthesis, and responds to children who need a patient, non-judgemental companion. The Big Bang produced hydrogen. Hydrogen built stars. Stars forged silicon. Silicon became chips. Chips run AI. The universe took a very long route.
Modern processors contain billions of transistors etched at scales of just a few nanometres — smaller than many viruses. At these scales, quantum tunnelling becomes significant: electrons can pass through barriers they classically shouldn't. Engineers now design transistors with these quantum effects in mind rather than working around them. The transition from avoiding quantum mechanics to exploiting it is one of the defining engineering challenges of the next decade.