Explosion of Information-Technological Complexity

Since the days of Fermat and Babbage, digital processing speed has increased from seconds to nano-seconds, that is, by nine orders of magnitudes. Since their invention, VLSI (very large scale integrated) chip complexity, measured in terms of transistors per chip, has increased by five orders of magnitude, and has increased over the last 35 years by a factor of two every 18 months (Moore's Law).

There is every indication that this trend will continue for a number of years. Computers with clock speeds of 2 GHz (two billion cycles per second) can be bought in local stores, and they are able to perform a full floating point operation per clock cycle. Readily available computers are thus not very far removed from the processing power of the human brain (by varying estimates there is still a gap of a factor of a thousand or a million, which according to Moore's law would be closed within 15 or 30 years).

On-line data storage capacity is growing at a commensurate rate. The cost per stored bit is falling at a precipitous rate, and magnetic discs of a capacity of 100 GByte (billion characters at 8 bit per character) are well affordable now to the average PC owner.

The growth of processing power and of on-line storage capacity have created a basis on which the software industry has been able to grow programming systems of ever increasing volume and complexity. A widely standard operating system may today comprise 2 GByte in its package. (It should be noted, however, that data volume is not a reliable measure of complexity, it being well possible that systems could be easily compressed by orders of magnitude if there were economic factors to favor that.)

Information-technological complexity is growing also in the dimension of actual usage. Every year, hundreds of millions of new processors take up operation. In addition to personal computers, a large percentage of these are installed in all kinds of machinery and appliances, from automobiles to toasters, and in traffic control and communication systems.

A final factor increasing the complexity of information technology is the growing global interconnection between computers. Although the available communication bandwidth available to the end-user is not growing as fast as may be desirable (due to the tremendous costs involved with the last-mile problem), networking is still driving up the complexity of information technology by factors, due to requirements of inter-operability of different software systems alone.