In the electronics industry it is well known that microprocessor speed doubles about every 18 months. Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965 famously stated Moore's Law (more about it here) which predicted a microprocessor speed doubling rate that would last for decades. He originally predicted a 1 year doubling rate. But the rate of progress slowed to an 18 month doubling rate in the late 1970s. Gordon Moore is now predicting that in a few generations the microprocessor speed doubling rate will slow to a three year interval.

While the microprocessor speed doubling rate has attracted the most attention in the popular press there are other electronics technology doubling rates that are of equal or greater importance. Two big ones are hard disk storage capacity and fibre optic transmission bandwidth. In contrast to Moore's Law for microprocessor speed the hard disk storage doubling rate has actually accelerated in recent years:

Throughout the 1970s and '80s, bit density increased at a compounded rate of about 25 percent per year (which implies a doubling time of roughly three years). After 1991 the annual growth rate jumped to 60 percent (an 18-month doubling time), and after 1997 to 100 percent (a one-year doubling time).

Fibre optic capacity is doubling at an even faster rate. The number of pulses per laser is doubling once every 18 months while the number of laser frequencies per optical fibre is doubling once every 12 months. So in 3 years we can expect the transmission capacity of a single fibre optic to go thru 5 doublings which translates into a 32 times increase in capacity per fibre. The combination of increase in number of lasers and increase in amount of information sent per laser yields a doubling period is less than 8 months. This is an astounding rate of progress.