In the 1995 film Apollo 13, the directors poked fun at the state of the art computers that existed in 1970 to power the Apollo moon mission. This line always stuck out in my mind:
Things like a computer that can fit into a single room a hold millions of pieces of information.
I found it absurd to look at the humongous computers that filled entire rooms, and compared them to the state as it existed in 1995 (or at least the Pentium II processor on my desktop).
Today, we see that an iPad 2 has more processing power than a Cray Super Computer circa 1985 (the size of a Washing machine).
I love progress.