I think it's just rare that there's ever a gap as big as there has been with computers between the first prototype and the current consumer grade equipment. Ig

I think it's just rare that there's ever a gap as big as there has been with computers between the first prototype and the current consumer grade equipment. Ignoring for a moment the per cycle efficiency increase (which is non-trivial and adds a couple orders of magnitude extra), a modern CPU is ~500,000 times faster than ENIAC was, which was itself a ~1,000 times faster than other computing solutions at the time, at a cost of $6,500,000 to $100. So per dollar, you're getting 32 billion times the computer. It's actually more like a trillion times the computer if you count in per-instruction efficiency gains. Yeah, we get better at most things, but almost no other thing have we gotten so much explosively better at it than computers. You can argue clothes, screws, cars, shoes, whatever are better now than they used to be. Maybe they are. But they're not a billion times better per dollar. I suspect that most of them strain to be a thousand times better per dollar.