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Two Centuries of Productivity Growth in Computing
Open accessAbstract
The present study analyzes computer performance over the last century and a half. Three results stand out. First, there has been a phenomenal increase in computer power over the twentieth century. Depending upon the standard used, computer performance has improved since manual computing by a factor between 1.7 trillion and 76 trillion. Second, there was a major break in the trend around World War II. Third, this study develops estimates of the growth in computer power relying on performance rather than components; the price declines using performance-based measures are markedly larger than those reported in the official statistics.
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Citations
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Metadata
- Authors
- Nordhaus, W. D.
- Venue
- The Journal of Economic History
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press (CUP)
- Published
- 2007-03
- Volume
- 67
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 128-159
- ISSN
- 0022-0507 (ISSN-L)
- 1471-6372
- OpenAlex
- W2160165792
- Cited by
- 295
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 12.69
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
