It is becoming increasingly difficult to stay on top of all the developments in the technology industry. Technology experts have to monitor developments on a daily basis to keep their edge. Moore’s law describes this, rapid growth, nature of technology. Moore’s law states that the number of transistors that can reside on a circuit doubles almost every two years. This trend has held true historically and many do not seeing it stopping in the near future.

The capabilities of electronic devices have increased at such an exponential rate that, what was once the “top of the line” or “cutting edge” is old news after only a year. The history of the Palm Pilot, which was one of the first handheld electronic devices, provides an excellent illustration of Moore’s law.

In 1996, Palm Computing released the Pilot. It had 128KB to 512KB of memory, a 160 x 160 pixel screen and could only display shades of gray. Just a year later Palm released the 2nd generation Pilot that had 1MB of memory. In 1998 the Palm 3 was released the supported memory cards and flash ROM which held 2MBs of memory. In 2000, Palm released a handheld with a color screen. By the early 2000s Palm had integrated Palm PDAs into phones. With this new phone integration the Palm Treo took off in popularity. The Treo had various iterations until 2009 when Palm released the Pre. The Pre was their answer to the Apple iPhone (a subject for another article). The Pre had a touch screen, ran on the fast 3G network, and had 8GBs of internal memory.

In just over 10 years Palm’s products exponentially increased in capabilities while decreasing its form factor. Memory went from 128KB to 8GB (1GB is equal to 1048576KBs), screens went from gray to full color and PDA functionality was integrated with phone and Internet. The devices of 1996 looked like technology from the stone ages just a few years later.

With Moore’s Law still going strong innovators need to work hard to keep up.