Ask Slashdot: How Powerful is Your Computer?

Kurt submitted this interesting question: "All of us have, at one time or another, played the 'I remember when' game. For me it was 'I remember when the first accoustic coupler modems came out for the Apple II'. My dad remembers when programming meant soldering wires. I found myself recently sitting in front of my K6-233 wondering things like: 'At what time was the entire world's computing power equal to my 233?' and 'How soon will I be able to buy a machine more powerful than the world's computing power when I was born?' What I would like to see is a graph of the entire worlds (desktop-mainframe) computing power (machines times MIPS [or other power rating]) - preferably with some "giants of the day" plotted as a reference. Does anyone know of such a thing? I'm just looking for ballpark numbers, here."