Speaking as someone of a certain vintage, it’s remarkable to see cheap, tiny, disposable devices hold the sort of computing power that tweenage me could only have dreamed of. The ARM Cortex-M0 chip that can be found inside a vape pen has eight times the clock speed of my beloved Commodore VIC-20, while sporting the same ROM and RAM.
This is Moore’s law writ large. In the 44 years since my VIC-20 was unwrapped on Christmas morning, processor speeds in an ‘average’ home computer have increased roughly 4,000-fold, while available RAM has expanded by a factor of around two million. But it’s easy to ignore the opposite end of Moore’s law: today we’re still building machines with the same basic power as a VIC-20, only now they cost just pennies, not hundreds of pounds.
In today’s money a VIC-20 cost around £800 at launch. By contrast, a Cortex-M0 can be had for about 4p. That’s a price reduction of a factor of 20,000. And whereas the VIC-20 was a family investment and a Big Deal, these modern microcontrollers have become throwaway components.
More than meets the eye
When you think of the batteries, rare earth metals, and plastics that go into making a disposable vape, it’s easy to see why governments have banned them. What’s not immediately obvious is that many of them also contain actual, honest-to-God computers.
And not just novelty devices like the absurd PhoneVape 30k, a “disposable” e-cigarette with Bluetooth and a phone-mirroring display (thankfully no longer on sale in the UK). Even the cheapest, most unassuming models often contain serious microcontrollers designed for industrial and embedded applications.
Thanks to ARM’s licensing model and the efficiencies of global manufacturing, these chips can now be bought for less than 4p each. At that price, it’s no wonder they’re everywhere - inside chargers, toys, smart bulbs, toothbrushes, and the kind of gadget you might pick up at a petrol station.
For the recycling-minded hobbyist, this means more than scavenging rechargeable batteries. It’s possible to harvest microcontrollers powerful enough to run web servers or, in one memorable tinkerer’s experiment, execute the Apollo 11 guidance software inside an off-the-shelf USB-C charger.
Smaller, cheaper, faster
The jump from the VIC-20 to the Cortex-M0 is striking, but computing isn’t alone in this ongoing cycle of “smaller, cheaper, faster, everywhere.”
Take surgery. In 1980, open-heart surgery typically meant a large incision, days in intensive care, and months of recovery. Today, thanks to endoscopic instruments, robotic assistance, and real-time imaging, similar procedures can be carried out through tiny keyhole incisions, with patients discharged in days rather than weeks. The parallel to computing is uncanny. What once required the full resources of a hospital theatre (or a living room filled with beige plastic and old-school CRT TVs) can now be done with a slim probe or a chip the size of a fingernail.
Mechanical engineering has seen a similar pattern. Where once a milling machine filled a workshop, today you can buy a desktop CNC or 3D printer for less than the cost of a VIC-20 in 1980’s money. The machine tool industry has embraced digitisation and miniaturisation in much the same way microelectronics has.
And medicine again offers a dramatic comparison. MRI scanners, first commercialised in the eighties, like the home computer, were multi-million-pound machines that only a few hospitals could afford. Now, portable MRI prototypes exist, battery-powered and small enough to be wheeled to a patient’s bedside. Like microcontrollers, this is a story not just of peak performance increasing, but of baseline performance becoming cheaper and more accessible.
Cheap as chips
There is an irony here. The VIC-20 was celebrated as an entry point into programming while today’s four-pence chips, buried in consumer products, are never even noticed, let alone programmed by their owners. Yet they are the logical endpoint of a desire for computing power to be both accessible and plentiful.
Where computing has diverged from medicine and mechanics is in its disposability. Few people would accept a “single-use” surgical robot or 3D printer, but we accept microcontrollers as expendable. That tension between the amazing capabilities and the wastefulness of putting it to use inside something as banal as a vape is one we’ll need to reconcile as we face environmental and resource constraints.
Or will chip design and fabrication keep improving, enabling disposable devices with the power of today’s smartphones or computers, to be casually binned after a few uses? They’ll simply be there, making things smarter, safer, and more efficient.
Computing power will keep multiplying, and the temptation to throw it into everything from vapes to coffee cups will remain strong. Maybe one day a future tinkerer will pull apart a long-forgotten gadget and marvel at how much power we once casually threw away - just as I now look back at my VIC-20, and at the Cortex-M0 humming away inside a vape.
Hopefully the story isn’t just about getting smaller and cheaper. Hopefully we’ll learn to be better at not just chucking this stuff away, while still making the most of the opportunities that cheap computing affords.
