Technology and How it Effects Digital Animations

Technology advances have increased the amount of work that can be applied to an animation within the same amount of time.

The average computer in 1995 had 8 megabytes of RAM and also had 420 megabytes of  Hard Disk Space. 

In comparison the average computer for today's standards has 8 to 16 gigabytes of RAM and has 1 terabyte of Hard Disk Space.

RAM vs. Hard Disk Space: 

RAM is the memory that your computer uses to compute processes and is not permanently stored. 

Hard Disk Space is the memory used to store information to be recalled whenever the user wants and    is stored until told to delete the data.^[1]

For those who don't understand the differences in megabytes and gigabytes:

1024 megabytes = 1 gigabyte^[2]

1024 gigabytes = 1 terabyte  ^[2]

Just to give some scope to the amount of memory.  Toy Story used around 3 terabytes of Hard Disk Space to hold all the files for the movie at completion.  This was held over multiple servers of memory, now days that could be held on a couple desktops. 

This information is important due to memory and processing power has been the "wall" that animation has been held back by.

The increases in the memory along with processing speeds that have increased at an equal rate to the memory allows the computer to do more functions at once but have not caught up with the pure power behind the software right now such as Autodesk's Maya or Pixologic's Zbrush.  

One of the best ways to show the changes due to technology is to just give examples from industry references such as, "Toy Story was originally rendered back in 1995, and to our best estimate probably had frame render times which averaged in the range of 4 hours or so." according to Craig L Good a pixar artist. Later on Craig Good estimated that with the performance differences in computers by todays standards, they could render each frame in only 15 seconds. However, just because they can redo a movie from 1995 in a flash does not mean that every render time is that low.  An example of this is in Transformers 3 each frame of a Transformer to render took around 72 hours according the commentary on the DVD.^[3]  

Computers have become faster but that has only increased the effort to push the material farther into realism.

References:
1.Computer Comparison via Relatively Interesting

2.Computer Memory Chart

3.Craig Good via Quora