The World’s Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information
The three basic information operations and their most prominent technologies.
World’s technological installed capacity to store information
World’s technological effective capacity to broadcast information in optimally compressed megabytes MB per year, for 1986, 1993, 2000, and 2007; semi-logarithmic plot
World’s technological effective capacity to telecommunicate information
World’s technological installed capacity to compute information on general-purpose computers, in MIPS
Annual growth of installed general-purpose computational capacity as percentage of all previous computations since 1977 (year t / Σ[1977, year t – 1])
source: www.sciencemag.org