A bunch of good metrics on the decade that was from Oliver Chiang. Here are a few:

–Number of e-mails sent per day in 2000: 12 billion

–Number of e-mails sent per day in 2009: 247 billion

–Revenues from mobile data services in the first half of 2000: $105 million

–Revenues from mobile data services in the first half of 2009: $19.5 billion

–Number of text messages sent in the U.S. per day in June 2000: 400,000

–Number of text messages sent in the U.S. per day in June 2009: 4.5 billion

–Number of pages indexed by Google in 2000: 1 billion

–Number of pages indexed by Google in 2008: 1 trillion

–Amount of hard-disk space $300 could buy in 2000: 20 to 30 gigabytes

–Amount of hard-disk space $300 could buy in 2009: 2,000 gigabytes (2 terabytes)

John Markoff surveys the near future prospects for Moore’s Law . . . and notes the first mention in print of the transistor, on July 1, 1948.

Advancing faster than Moore’s Law, hard disk digital storage technologies are are the unsung heroes of the tech revolution. The beat goes on, and a large number of new technologies, from hybrid drives to phase-change ovonics to racetrack memory, promise to match the capacity of digital storage and/or DRAM with the speed of SRAM and other solid state memories. See a big special report from MIT’s Technology Review on all these ”next memory” candidates, and more.