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Fifteen Years of Technology Reporting
jeffdsimpson writes "PC World NZ is 15 years old this month and they've written a story looking back at some of the statements made in the magazine over the years. Some gems include 'The past 10 years have seen a dramatic increase in clock rates, from just under 5MHz for the original IBM PC to 33MHz for the latest 386 systems. This more than six-fold increase will not be repeated' from July 1989 and 'The Internet Connection Company of New Zealand (ICONZ) offers full internet access and charges $50 a megabyte for email, and $10 a megabyte for all other information sent or received' from April 1994"
it is nice when a company can take a pop shot at its self. You have to respect the magazine for showing some of those comments.
(what is it with humor stories? everyone jumps on them)
... then we're off to the next. We're living in beta, babies. Enjoy the ride.
... Despite the power of Microsoft's OS/2 LAN Manager, it's still a NetWare world. Novell's 1989 introduction of its NetWare 386 network operating system more or less guaranteed that much of the world will stick with Netware."
... last year, DOS accounted for 70% of operating system units sold worldwide."
... To really take advantage of Windows, you'll want either a fast 286 or a 386 machine, preferably with at least 2MB of RAM. Enhanced mode allows you to run multiple DOS applications
PC World at 15
It was 5475 days ago today, or thereabouts, that your favourite computer magazine first hit newsstands. PC World lifer Chris Keall looks back on the laughter, the tears and the $24,000 386.
Chris Keall
Monday, 28 June, 2004
Since it first appeared as a standalone magazine in 1989 (having done time in the trenches as a Computerworld supplement), PC World has chronicled the highs, the lows and the sometimes keyboard-pounding agony that is the personal computer industry. As you follow me on our highlights tour of articles past (in our own - cringe - unedited words), you'll find three themes emerge:
1. Star Trek references intrude with troubling frequency.
2. People always underestimate how quickly hardware will evolve.
3. People are constantly thumping said keyboards as promised usability breakthroughs never quite happen. Software developers just about get a handle on one trend and
June 1989
PS/2 luggable gains positive reception
"The PS/2 Model P70 is a high-functionality, 20MHz 386 portable ($16,425) that weighs in at 9kg (the lightest notebooks today are 1.2kg - CK). PC professionals are saying the VGA monitor and the 4MB of memory (expandable to 8MB), make it a powerful luggable."
July 1989
IBM's 486 steals show
"The past 10 years have seen a dramatic increase in clock rates, from just under 5MHz for the original IBM PC to 33MHz for the latest 386 systems. This more than six-fold increase will not be repeated."
Dec 1989/Jan 1990
Easy DOS it
"Processing speeds are now fast enough to satisfy all but the most exacting user."
PC World Awards
Best desktop PC: Apple Macintosh IIcx
Best laptop: Compaq SLT/286
Best word processor: WordPerfect 5 for DOS
March 1990
WordPerfect 5.1
"With 11 5.25-inch floppy discs, installation may seem daunting, but there are many new features, with added commands including {FOR} and {WHILE} loops."
May 1990
Could 1990 be the year of the LAN?
"The philosophical dividing line between the eras of standalone and networked PCs will be drawn in 1990.
Word processors: Nine packages point for point
"Of these products, three - Samna Ami Professional, NBI Legend and Microsoft Word for Windows - exploit the new graphical tools provided for Windows-compatible products. The remaining six - IBM DisplayWrite, Lotus Manuscript, Microsoft Word for DOS, Aston-Tate's Multimate, WordPerfect for DOS and WordStar - offer various levels of text-based word processing."
June 1990
Has OS/2 version 2.1 got the right stuff?
"When Microsoft and IBM jointly announced OS/2 almost three years ago, many thought it would become the predominant operating system. That obviously hasn't happened yet
July 1990
Return to the clone zone
"In this issue's comparison of 33MHz 386 machines, we look at five well-known international brands with prices ranging from $17,000 to $24,000. But when we researched local assemblers like PC Direct, TL Systems and Ultra, we found equivalent machines for less than half that. Companies such as ALR, Compaq and HP will find it difficult to justify these differences in the face of cut-price clone competition."
August 1990
At last, a true rival to DOS?
"Windows 3 is more than an update. In many respects it's an entirely new environment
I'm not sure how long that NZ pipe will hold up to this lot ;)
full internet access and charges $50 a megabyte for email, and $10 a megabyte for all other information sent or received
I would be paying a fortune for my connection
Insert 640K joke
From the article
Windows 3 is more than an update. In many respects it's an entirely new environment ... To really take advantage of Windows, you'll want either a fast 286 or a 386 machine, preferably with at least 2MB of RAM. Enhanced mode allows you to run multiple DOS applications.
So, why can't Microsoft duplicate this feat with Win2k3? I'd like to see them fit it into a 2 MB footprint, or 20 MB.
Reminds me that I stepped into the x86 world in July of '93. I bought an AST 486/25 SX with one meg. on-board and a 180 Mb HHD (compressed). What we have today was hard for me to imagine then.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
Why do people read these things, anyways? PC World is nothing but a catalog of buzzwords and hype. Always was.
Yes, becasue we are south of the equator, actually I'm about as far south as San Francisco is north of the equator, similar climates also fairly warm in summer and not too cold in winter.
It just goes to show, no one can predict anything with any sort of accuracy. Those who rely on such predictions for action, caveat emptor!
Curb CO2 emissions: Kill yourself today!
the more they stay the same. I think their nerd quotient is still as applicible today as it was 12 years ago:
How can I tell if I am a nerd?
"Subtract the number of girlfriends/boyfriends/wives/husbands you've had from the number of computers you have owned. If the number is positive, you are a nerd."
Damn, I'm at +5....
No news source is ever going to own up to its really spectacular gaffes, though. I'm going off to our family cabin this weekend. There are lots of old Popular Sciences there -- I think my grandfather's -- from the early 1950s. Sample article, paraphrased:
(And yeah, that's a real example.)
Popular Mechanics from back in the day has a lot of do-it-yourself projects that would kill anyone who tried them. Example: Make a "backpack" for your car from plywood, clip it on with a couple of cheap latches, and let your kids travel cross country back there. That one stuck in my mind, but there are many others.
The ones they'll admit to in articles like this are like the Popular Mechanics article from the cabin about bizarre new cars from Europe: Front Wheel Drive? Seatbelts that go across your shoulder? They'll never catch on, because surveys done by Ford show Americans want bigger and bigger vehicles.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
$10 NZ dollars a megabyte .. wow that's pretty cheap.
I'm hoping all the $'s are NZD's (New Zealand Dollars). One NZD is roughly 0.6 USD by the way.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
Fifteen Years of Technology Reporting
In general, And still no expose on price fixing and monopoly abuse, still no coverage of fundamental research in both software and hardware, just the same copy and paste press release stories. No undercover journalism, no coverage of the spamming and malware writing "bad" parts of PC town. Still the same meaningless benchmarks and megahurts ads for articles. No coverage of the scary moves by the once garage operation and now mega coorporations. No credit where credit is due for real inovation, no mention of the real inventors of "the next cool thing", just of the latest guy to market a clone years later.
Overall I really hope that the dead tree coverage is better elseware in this world. Beside the likes of el`reg and vulture HQ only C`t seems to have some grip with what is going on. At slashdot we often joke about the dumbed down (or plain dumb) coverage by "normal" news sources (cnn/nyt), but the dedicated dead tree rags basicly have no journalism/real news whatsoever.
Sure its more complicated then this, but when looking back, do you see improvement over the years?
Yeah, I mean, if those processor trends continued, we'd be seeing crazy processing speeds now - 300, 400 Mhz. RAM and hard drives, just wouldn't be able to keep up.
Get your own free personal location tracker
If you have a satellite internet connection (which you might need in places where the telephone service is very poor, in parts of Africa for instance) then you will pay around $10 a megabyte today if you pay as you go.
I have a friend who pays this much, so I always keep my emails to him short, and don't attach a sig.
Isn't that a rave?
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
I'm keeping track, got a long running bet I intend to win, and it's been looking really good lately.
This was written on a Dual 2 Ghz G5 and 23" Cinema, in between watching a DVD movie, TV in a window, iTunes jamming and Halo in a window and half dozen other apps going at once.
Oh yea I forgot about the 3D fish swimming as my desktop behind it all.
Ah, that brings back memories... A solid move from MS to kill off it's competition. I haven't thought about windows without a browser for a couple of years now, and from the looks of things now, I'll never have to think of it again.
And to think I never used that one, and sticked to Nutscrape for such a long time before switching to opera and then firefox.
I wonder whatever happened? :)
I have 4 systems networked currently. But if I subtract 1 wife, 2 children and 1 pet, I feel that I break even. :-O
That's probably the most important cultural change in today's technology.
Formerly you studied and learned your knowledge once in your lifetime. In school and college, that is. After that you lived on and used the knowledge.
Everyday life was rapid and the knowledge stayed. Now it is vice versa. You probably can't tell if you had a brunette girlfriend year or three ago, or in which year you found your nowadays favorite band.
The computer world changes entirely in a few years. You'd never mistake a 2002 PC for a 1996 PC. The technological or professional time runs a lot faster than a private time, probably the first time in the human history.
"..from just under 5MHz for the original IBM PC to 33MHz for the latest 386 systems. "
Just imagine a beowulf cluster of these!
In 1989 I had an ST I think. The Amigas were going strong, and the C64 was hanging on in there by its fingertips. The magazine awards best PC to a Mac IIcx. In the UK at least, there were things such as the Amstrad PCW range - CPM-based (I believe) green screen business machines that did well for themselves as straight wordprocessing devices.
Then slowly it all died away, until now we're basically on a PC-only world on the desktop, even if a few flickers of OS competition are stirring. Only the Mac remains outside the fold, and I say this as an OS X user. Even so, just two hardware platforms for personal computing is hardly the same as the plethora of makes available in the 80s.
Ah well. Fun while it lasted. Time to dig out the Spectrum vs C64 vs Beeb flamewars of the school playground...
Cheerss,
Ian
CERN has a commitee by the name of PASTA which tracks computer technology, making predictions of future growth.
:)
I remember reading the first such report in 1996, and finding predictions of 500GB disks in PCs for the year 2006 somewhat inconceivable. There were similar results for CPUs and memory.
I just had a quick look on the CERN website and found their latest report (2002). There's a lot of information in there, much of it quite technical, and I'm in a rush so let me leave the interested to read it, and I'll just make a few points:
- The predictions they've been making for the last 8 years have turned out to be much too conservative in some fields.
- KCHF and MCHF stand for kilo-swiss-francs (803 USD) and mega-swiss-francs (803,000 USD). Yes, the people there really think in these numbers. They're scientists.
- LHC is the next generation of CERN experiments, due to go online now in (I believe) 2007. As far as data aquisition goes: "A peak rate of 1000 MBytes/s is required, and capacity for 5000 TB per year. This is a rather minimal requirement in terms of drives. In practice, support for ~2.5 GBytes/s might be needed at LHC startup"
From the article:
Self-aware computers
Even after 60 years of development, computers are still basically machines that can only crunch an endless stream of ones and zeros. Although several research projects are focusing on imbuing computers with reasoning and decision-making cognition - one has been under way for 20 years - that remains a holy grail for computer science. [emphasis mine]
I've long dismissed computers ever being self-aware. As I've heard before, "The subject of whether or not a computer can think is about as interesting as whether or not a submarine can swim". Computers weren't designed to think; they were designed to follow instructions. Hence, their supposed intelligence is necessarily limited to the intelligence of their programmers.
AI is indeed interesting when it comes to machine "learning" and adaptive problem solving, but things such as self-awareness and good judgement are far beyond the realm of computers. It isn't a problem of processing power or finding the perfect algorithm, but rather of the substance of self-awareness. Self-awareness is a property that the soul impinges on the mind, not an inherent property of neurons. The pursuit of self-aware machines could be compared to building an ever more complicated car and wondering why we still need drivers. The barrier isn't a matter of complexity or understanding per se, but rather the fact that good judgement and self-awareness are the result of a spiritual, rather than mechanical or chemical, process. You won't ever find these traits in an entirely mechanical process.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
" ... according to Microsoft, Windows 95 will run on a 386 with 4MB of RAM. Our verdict: don't try this at home."
I remember installing it on my home computer, a 386 sx (no math co) 25MHz, 20MB Harddisk and 4 MB RAM. Yes I had to install diskdouble and set default free space reporting to 3x to bypass pre-installation HD space checking by the installer.
My only defence is that Slashdot was acting strangely - 503 errors all the time, taking years to respond.
Cheers,
Ian
(I cut and pasted that text, incidentally.)
Back when I worked at a major modern art museum, we had the two large local papers essentially parroting back our press releases about new shows as "reviews." These were big time journalists covering areas in which their subjective opinions were an accepted, encouraged part of their columns. They showed less intellectual curiosity than most fifth graders I know, at least in print. It was mostly about playing it safe and cashing the checks, from what I could tell, though they all liked what they were writing about and could be very interested and opinionated in person.
I have lots of contact with music reviewers, too. They don't have canned press releases to work from, so they've resorted to their own convention-laced boilerplate reviews. (Period instruments? I will include a tossoff remark about how the orchestra was less squeaky than has been the case in the past.) Pretty often they don't even cut and paste correctly -- the performers' names are often wrong in the review.
And those are in artistic areas -- where you're supposed to have an opinion and inject it into your writing, and where taking risks would theoretically be less damaging.
Also -- more general point -- why do people even write "prediction" stories? They're totally lame even for sports, where you can almost immediately figure out whether you got it right. If I was a news editor, I'd forbid anyone from writing prediction stories. (Maybe that'd change the completely idiotic, inane, asinine, expectations-spinning political coverage we see. Horse race polls before an election aren't informing anyone of anything, they're just attempts to tell me what I supposedly think already. That's utter crap.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Dammit, I paid $2400US for my 486/25 MB in 1992 and i'll be dammed if i'm going to upgrade until it's completely depreciated off the books!
15 years ago. 1989. One thing this article can't pick up on due to it being a PC magazine is the amount of platform diversity there was then. In 1989 I had an ST I think. The Amigas were going strong, and the C64 was hanging on in there by its fingertips. The magazine awards best PC to a Mac IIcx. In the UK at least, there were things such as the Amstrad PCW range - CPM-based (I believe) green screen business machines that did well for themselves as straight wordprocessing devices. Then slowly it all died away, until now we're basically on a PC-only world on the desktop, even if a few flickers of OS competition are stirring. Only the Mac remains outside the fold, and I say this as an OS X user. Even so, just two hardware platforms for personal computing is hardly the same as the plethora of makes available in the 80s. Ah well. Fun while it lasted. Time to dig out the Spectrum vs C64 vs Beeb flamewars of the school playground... Cheers, Ian
In 1989 I had an ST I think. The Amigas were going strong, and the C64 was hanging on in there by its fingertips. The magazine awards best PC to a Mac IIcx. In the UK at least, there were things such as the Amstrad PCW range - CPM-based (I believe) green screen business machines that did well for themselves as straight wordprocessing devices.
Then slowly it all died away, until now we're basically on a PC-only world on the desktop, even if a few flickers of OS competition are stirring. Only the Mac remains outside the fold, and I say this as an OS X user. Even so, just two hardware platforms for personal computing is hardly the same as the plethora of makes available in the 80s.
Ah well. Fun while it lasted. Time to dig out the Spectrum vs C64 vs Beeb flamewars of the school playground...
Cheers,
Ian
...is competition, I don't care about there being more than one platform. IBM vs. clones, Intel vs. AMD, nVidia vs. ATI etc. etc. work out fine. The only dark side has been the OS, where there's been nothing between Windows vs. OS/2 (then) and Windows vs. Linux (now).
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
"A telephone connection can transport you from one bulletin board to another [...] We were able to download an X-rated picture, no questions asked."
WHAT'S THE NUMBER PLEASE POST
In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane. -Oscar Wilde
Just goes to proove:
Just when you think you know what's going on, reality throws you a curve moose.
We're geeks... We're the sorcerers of the modern-day world. --
15 years ago. 1989. One thing this article can't pick up on due to it being a PC magazine is the amount of platform diversity there was then.
In 1989 I had an ST I think. The Amigas were going strong, and the C64 was hanging on in there by its fingertips. The magazine awards best PC to a Mac IIcx. In the UK at least, there were things such as the Amstrad PCW range - CPM-based (I believe) green screen business machines that did well for themselves as straight wordprocessing devices.
Then slowly it all died away, until now we're basically on a PC-only world on the desktop, even if a few flickers of OS competition are stirring. Only the Mac remains outside the fold, and I say this as an OS X user. Even so, just two hardware platforms for personal computing is hardly the same as the plethora of makes available in the 80s.
Ah well. Fun while it lasted. Time to dig out the Spectrum vs C64 vs Beeb flamewars of the school playground...
Cheers,
Ian
this one's a pisser:
"Yes, Compaq is first to our shores with a Pentium-based PC - the $8750 ex GST 5/60M. The '5' is to remind a few of us that this is actually a 586 even if Intel insists we all speak Latin."
bakakakakakakakaaaaaaaaaaaa
biological constructs have had billions of years of natural selection thrashing around nucleotide sequences to produce what we now see as varying levels of intelligence and awareness.
Computer (and robotic) technology has been around how long? 60 or so years in practice?
Dogma - "let's just say we'd like to avoid any empirical entanglements."
On a side note, I remember as late as I think the early 1990s that Target was STILL selling bargain-basement game titles for the Commodore 64.
I bought a C64 from eBay a couple of months ago. It's amazing, but it's still possible to buy unopened, shrink-wrapped games if you look hard enough. I bought Psi 5 Trading Company on disk, and it arrived shrink-wrapped complete with registration card and a question about "which computers do you own?"
God I was tempted to send that card in.
Cheers,
Ian
Their predictions on clock speed actually aren't that far off the mark, assuming they're talking about the system clock as a whole rather than just the CPU clock speed.
When the 486's came out shortly after that article in 1989, the fastest speed they got up to was still only 33MHz. By applying clock doubling, Intel was able to get the DX2 CPUs running at 66MHz internally -- but externally mainboard speeds were still 33.
In fact, mainboard speeds STILL peaked at 33MHz when the first generation of Pentiums came out. The P5-90 was a clock-tripled 30MHz system, for example.
As I recall, it wasn't until the P5-100 that main speeds above 33MHz were used (some 100's were 33x3, others were 50x2.) And that was circa 1994.
So five years with no progress in base system clockspeeds? The prediction seems pretty accurate to me.
Lately I've started going back and viewing the slashdot headlines from 5 years ago. Its really hilarious to go back and see where we've been.
/. editors put together some slash-way-back stories to dig deeper into some of the more popular fads and see where they're at now.
Here's a start:
1 Year
2 Years
5 Years
Modifying the URL to go to an arbitrary day is easy. Just modify the YYYYMMDD code in the URL:
http://slashdot.org/index.pl?issue=19990722
It would be nice to see the
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
May 1995
Classic Dumb Terminal
How many Apple Newton users does it take to change a lightbulb?
Fiv3 - tWO to fu%6~ th# jlwww aND three tO gurr%^ the laddEr. (Handwriting recognition still had a way to go before hitting Tablet levels - CK)
Looks like we can safely attribute the creation of leet speak to those ever-trendy designers over at Apple.
Free software might not make it possible to compete with slave labor, but it will help. If the largest cost of hardware becomes the "IP" of BIOS and software, free software will reduce those costs and might make manufacturing elsewhere possible. As it is, the world is one big screwdriver plant supplied by China and ruled by IP from two or three companies.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Ummm, $999 Handspring Visor Pro? Methinks not...
This has been a test. If this had been an actual Sig, you would have been amused.
All this computer history and they didnt mention the original iMac? It lead to so many multicolored products! Along the same note, no iTunes music store? The music store is more recent but it seems to me that those would make it on a list like this.
This MUST be the first ever dupe comment to ever get modded up on SlashDot.
Whats next? Duplicate rant about dupe comments?
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
It's a general trend. Back in 2000, we had some quality posters, people who knew their shit and were willing to share it.
These days, those people don't post here.
You want to talk about security, you join a mailing list or moderated newsgroup. You want to talk about anything in depth, you sure as hell don't talk about it here.
What happens if you know the entire discussion is completely wrong or inaccurate or shallow, and you know something better? Your post will be buried in a sea shit-posts by mouthbreathing zealots who talk about Nutscrape and Micro$haft and rice-out their Gentoo 'rig', without ever being told to shut the fuck up.
FUCK SLASHDOT! And if you actually cared about the people you post with, you'd leave too.
Impossu: Shut up, fag.
There was a small flame war about that in Metro (a London newspaper) a few months ago...
"$10 a megabyte for all other information sent or received"
$10 NZ? That's not so far removed from the ~£3 per MB I'm paying for mobile Internet (i.e. GPRS) a decade later...
Whats next? Duplicate rant about dupe comments?
The most painful punishment for MS is to disregard all their copyrights, patents and IP.
It's fascinating how materialist philosophers rarely possess the modesty to see their own assumptions, meanwhile possessing great eagerness in pointing out the polar opposite assumption in the soul/spirituality line of thinking.
/. crowd, and as such deserves sneers and jeers instead of cheers.
What is being as in "I am!"? How many pieces of Lego can make that? Is mind a quality of electricity? How the fuck can *you* assert that people are an entirely mechanical process without even pretending to back it up by facts or argument. By the sound of it, your word alone should be taken as *the* fact of the matter.
Simply that there are strong isomorphisms between what goes on in the body and what goes on in the mind does not imply that mind by necessity is a product of the brain/central nervous system -- it is easy to imagine there could be an essence which is immeasurable, yet fits with the body like a hand into a glove (of course, this is a crude analogy, but you get the picture). You can see the movements of a glove directly, but not the hand inside.
For myself, I find this almost easier to believe than collections of units of matter, which I am tempted to presume possess about the same awareness as individual pieces of lego conspiring with air and water and whatever other chemicals in order to make something that experiences.
I believe that all things considered, each and every one of us chooses what to believe given what we may infer from the world around us, from theory, from personal wishes and, of course, from theory and philosophy.
Just because one fails to acknowledge how other interpretations and beliefs may be possible, for whatever reasons one may have, does *not* mean that one has to run around trying to push people over with unequivocal assertions unbacked by any presented facts or arguments. In fact, I see this as an attack on the collective dignity, free will and intellect of the
I'm posting AC to preserve an aura of honesty.
Talk about coating your dick in honey and shoving it into a beehive.
Pardon the crudeness. I'm but a silly countryboy.
Back in the early 80's a "Nixie Tube" manufacturer's rep had an article saying that the LED display would never become low cost enough to replace the nixie tube neon display.
You'd never mistake a 2002 PC for a 1996 PC.
In similar condition, both running Windows 9x, I doubt that there would be much perceivable difference. Obviously speed/hard-drive size; *possibly* monitor size would give it away, but fundamentally, it's still a beige-box PC compatible.
You'll notice the real difference when the PC is no longer the dominant form of computer.
"Oh yeah... I remember, I used to use one of those all the time.".... and you realise just how much things have changed.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
1. No matter what you predict in the future, you will be horribly wrong.
2. The people in the future will mercilessly mock you for it.
I remember that picture!
That BBS is still up and lo and behold there the picture is still available!
JENYJAMSN.EPS
BBS #8675309
Classic Dumb Terminal
"It's ridiculous claiming that video games influence children. For instance, if Pac-man affected kids born in the 80s, we should by how have a bunch of teenagers who run around in darkened rooms and eat pills while listening to monotonous electronic music."
Finally. Someone knows why Raves and Ecstasy (The drug, not the feeling) are so popular.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Google'd cache
Did I hear you right?
Did I hear you sayin'
You were gonna make a copy
Of a game without payin'?
Come on guys...
I thought you knew better!
Don't Copy That Floppy!
No more Carmen Sandiego,
No more Oregon Trail.
Tetris and the others,
They're all gonna fail!
All of Tetris was stolen into the United States and modified against the original. Tetris originated from a talented man of Russia; programmed by Alexey Pajitnov. The MPAA is showing a derivitave work in their "Don't Copy That Floppy" video which infringes on Alexey Pajitnov's intellect; yet the MPAA is not enforcing Alexey Pajitnov's intellect; the MPAA is enforcing the copyrights to the corporations that stole and cloned Tetris. They don't care because all the pirates are generating taxes for the United States' income. Also, all the sideshow freak interviews are of programmers complaining about someone playing their "game" without paying for it, and every single one of those programmers has been proven they stole even content from others to make their pirated "game" and then complain to the MPAA. United States is a pirate!
Ha! What you need is that little Honda wagon pretending to be an SUV -- with the hoseable interior. Oops, not enough seats -- but it's getting a little closer to the cartoon, I have to admit. I'm just surprised they didn't work in radiation or nuclear materials of some sort. "Water simply boils off this couch -- providing a convenient source of energy for the many modern kitchen appliances." They always work in the radiation when they can.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Having lived through that 15-year era, I have to say that while I don't bat an eye at the MHz or MB ratings of equipment, the prices reported back then are astoundingly high.
They are talking about $28,000 PCs... who the heck would ever pay that much for a PC? They talk about $3,000 as a "breakthrough" when today you can grab an average system for $1,000 or less.
I would be curious to see a price trend chart over the years, of the "high-end PC", "average PC" and "bargain PC", whatever that meant in each time period.
Personally, I was into Commodores 15 years ago. The Amiga 2000 cost abour $2000 when your average PC cost about $5000. I never understood why people would buy PC compatibles back then!
They're talking New Zealand Dollars; multiply by 0.6 to translate into American
Goddam, it's true, and I'm a New Zealander, so why am I laughing...?
Sigh...
It may surprise you to know that in New Zealand, $26,000 is probably still a little too much to consider paying for a computer. Try $1200.
Meantime Ford's share of the overall market plummeted next to Japanese makers who weren't even in the picture in my old magazines. Honda and Toyota came into the market in the 70s with the compact commuter car. Volkswagens before them, too, with the original Beetle (and the first minivan, which we never really acknowledge). And Ford, with its surveys showing Americans wanted bigger boat sedans, never saw it coming.
Today Ford's had huge sales in their (supposedly badly unreliable) Focus overseas -- compact car for the European market as much as the home one. Saw Focuses in Paris this last March, where there were *no* other American cars other than a single butt-ugly yellow Humvee. In the US they're selling Explorers still, amazingly.
People are incredibly irrational about cars, for something that's so danged expensive...
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Got a email from PC World NZ today telling me thanks to this article they got ten times the normal unique visitors on the Friday
Our little girl Susan is a most admirable slut, and pleases us mightily - Samuel Pepys (1633-1703)