"A lot has changed with respect to computers in the last 25 years"-would be an understatement. The rise of the Internet age and affordable home computing has made computers part of almost every one's everyday life and a huge part of the economy. It has changed the way people work, communicate, do business, enjoy entertainment and live. This has put pressure on R&D companies and manufacturers to battle out for new competitive technologies and has made computers a great deal more affordable. There is an ongoing integration between computers and other technologies such as television, telephones and wireless communications. Computers are also assuming bigger roles in the industry, taking over certain tasks that have been performed by humans and at the same time creating new jobs that did not exist previously.

Using the computers and internet for communicating, banking, researching, reading news, gaming, digital imaging, data mining, multimedia design are just some of the applications available at home today that were not available a couple of decades ago. It is both a technological and software evolution that has permitted these things to exist. As is shown in this Intel presentation
http://www.intel.com/technology/timeline.pdf the number of transistors available to the average home consumer has grown from 134,000 in 1982 to about 1,000,000,000 today. Moore's Law states that the number of transistors will double roughly every two years. Then, by Moore's Law we should have about 134,000(2)^13 = 1,097,728,000 transistors available today, an amazingly accurate prediction made in 1965. At the same time we have to realize that even the most powerful computer is useless without the right software. I believe that many of new developments that will come in the future will be possible not simply because of even faster computer speeds, but because of new innovative ideas and good programming.


So what awaits us in this brave new world of super-computing, and how much longer can we expect this kind of growth to last? The problem with making transistors smaller is that there is a physical limit to how small they can be, and it seems that the chip companies are already struggling with the shrinking. To continue the increase in transistors, they are now placing multiple cores on a single chip, but this has its limits too http://blog.elisehuard.be/2007/12/moores-law/. The real progress is going to be made when something like quantum computing becomes feasible, but this is highly unlikely to happen within the next twenty years
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computer.
I think that for now the computers are already fast enough for many things. Even if from now on computers did not get faster for many years, the applications would still keep on getting better and better regardless of the speed. Of course other parts of computers like memory, bandwidth and displays will keep on improving. Some things that I think would be nice to see in the next 20 years are the connection to the Internet of the poorer regions of the world where the penetration of the Internet at present time is very low, much higher bandwidth speeds, much more reliable glitch free software and movie quality real-time graphics.