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Time Warp Computer Pricing Revealed
Agg writes "OCAU has posted an article which shows just how much computer pricing has changed over the last 20 years or so. During a 24-hour period I asked OCAU readers to scan and send me an ad page from the oldest Australian computer magazine they could find. This snapshot of historical pricing is fascinating and, quite frankly, a little scary. How does $5999 for an 8.6MB hard drive strike you? For reference, 1 Australian Dollar is worth 70 to 80 US cents."
Hardware prices drop over time.
Has the Australian Dollar always been worth 70 to 80 US cents?
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They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
considering money is just a symbolic representation of value, it seems reasonable that 8 megs was more valuable 20 years ago and cost a lot more money.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
I remember this box called IBM XT, it had like 640k RAM, 4.77 MHz horcepower and could do amazing things. My athlon 2k can do even more amazing things, and I'm very happy with the way prince pr. MHz has gone the last years.. and it just keeps on getting better and better! Excellent.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
I bought a laptop about 3 years ago for around $2000 and at the time it was an average laptop. Look at what you can get for $2000 today, it's usually top of the line stuff, mine would probably cost around $1000 now. I guess the price change goes along with the time no matter what the only thing is that we are blind to the fact that some things that used to cost thousands of dollars ten years ago where top of the line back then, while now they're considered garbage. Look at these new plasma displays and stuff that sell for few thousands. I bet our grandkids will make fun of us and call us dumbasses because we spent so much money on displays that they could get (in year 2030) for about $150 each with a FARRR better quality and size.
Those days, with a 10MB Tandon hard disk on my $1,000 Personal computer, I could edit documents, use the humble telnet to log in to the Unix server priced at $2,000; I could update a bit of data on to that Ingres database using 'Forms'. To update a form on a server from a client still seems to need about $1,500; so it's not all that big of a difference.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
I hope that site wasn't hosted on a 128K Mac that they brought here in a flying DeLorean.
...does $5999 for an 8.6MB hard drive strike you?
As silly. I mean, why didn't they want that one more dollar?
I couldn't get to page 2 - just when it was getting interesting...
What are you listening to? (http://megamanic.blogetery.com/)
Damn! Slashdotted on 2 of 4 comments. I guess they're still using 8 MB drives. That's all cool, but warp into the future already!
Prices are high for really new stuff and really old stuff. That's not just for initial cost. That is for maintenance too. The idea is to keep your hardware in the middle, probably upgrading between 2-5 years. It saves money. I mean, think about how many hours it takes to troubleshoot a DOS program now. Who knows the stuff anymore? This is an idea a colleague of mine and I are trying to get studied by an economics professor I used to work with back in college.
I'll have one of those (137KB jpg).
But can I overclock it from 60Hz to, say, 3000Hz?
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
In Byte Magazine, July 1983, Oracle was mentioned in the updated products section (I think it was version 2 or 3), with multi-user licenses priced between $600 - $2000.
We're living in an age where things no longer just run, they take leaps and bounds. We're starting to look at Terabytes of storage for the average web monkey (leech if you perfer) at a reasonable price, go back five years and it was impressive to have a HD collection going to even half that.
Once you have got 2x2 you start to get 4x4, 6x6, 12x12 and take much bigger leaps at each step untill you're talking 100 tera HDs.
I like muppets.
hmmmm but does it run linux?
Who keeps up with current prices? No your average person, that's for sure. Coming out of an era when the last computers purchased were $3000, convincing someone to pay $1200 for a Dell is not too difficult.
I hope my children will be able to make similar claims.
Raj Against the Machine! http://social-butterfly.appspot.com/
Not too long after that I paid almost $800 for four 4MB SIMMS for my new illegal installation of Win95, and thought I was a badass.
when you consider that programs were measured in hundreds of K back then.
Also like a lot of old-timers (in my 30's), I wax nostalgic for the days when you put in the disk, turned the computer on, and used your program. No DRM, no crashes (not as often as now, anyway), no spyware, no internet or solitaire or slashdot, no mysterious slow-down in your OS over a period of months (KDE, why do you do that????).
Then again, no powerbook, no OSX, no VMWare, no wifi or bluetooth, no Ruby (okay, well, there was Lisp and SmallTalk, that's true), no Zaurus linux workstation that fits in your pocket.
That stuff is cool but I really miss the simplicity and reliability.
Someone else pointed out that the price of computers never really change, but that there is more power for the same price. In 1987 our family computer (mid-range) and printer cost around $1200. Today the same amount of money will also buy a mid-range computer (at least for gaming). However, this idea is getting less and less true as computers become commoditized and "powerful enough".
I remember when I was going through my old stuff, stubmled on a early 90's copy of Computer Shopper Magazine, and flipped to a vender who was selling an EGA monitor for $2995.
But, this is the case with competition: To make money, you must have either a better or cheaper product.
This is also true with other electronic devices as well: Video Game Consoles, Cell Phones, Toys, etc...
Eventualy, I see that we'll have throw away computers avalible to everybody. I just wonder how long away that really is... Sm:)e.
Too many sites do this, and then face the fury of /.
Unfortunately some of the images are quite large (none more than 250KB)
"Time Warp Computer Pricing Revealed"
And yet the cost of computer magazines have gone up. $12 for a Linux magazine with a CD.
Considering that the HDD from the same ad is a whopping 20MB - I'd like common removable media format that holds around 5% of the capacity of my HDD.
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
It had a 68000 and a Z-80. When running as a Unix box, the Z80 functioned as an I/O processor. When runing as a Radio Shack Model II, the 68000 was essentially idle
The first box to land in Edmonton ran Xenix/Unix on 256KB of ram, and an 9MB hard disk. I don't remember how much the box cost but the (14" platter) Hard Disk was about $10K.I actually managed to get Xenix, vi and nroff running off of one 1.2MB (12") floppy disk (including a swap partition) with the second floppy disk being used for user data.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Like a lot of old timers (in my 90s), I am nostalgic for the days when you whip out a wooden portable rack with beads and start flickering them around. No DRM, no crashes (even survives jasmine tea spilled all over it), no buttons, no radiation from screens, no need for power, no mysterious disappearance of your work when the power goes out.
Then again, no $modern_gadget1, $modern_gadget2, $modern_gadget3, $modern_gadget4.
That stuff is cool but I really miss the simplicity and reliability.
But at least back then they weren't getting faster faster than you could upgrade them.
"I hope my children will be able to make similar claims."
Viagra, Viagra-II, Viagra-III, Viagra-"Is that a space elevator, or are you just happy to see me?"
It could handle up to about 300 simultaneous users before it started to slow down real noticably, and it cost about $6Million Dollars.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
in 1987 an aussie colleague got married and went on a honeymoon to the us. his proudest revellation on his return was the 5mb harddrive he bought for $1000!
Of course back then a lot of kit was made in the US, are there any significant parts that are made in the US anymore? On a related note, how much does it cost to ship say a standard ATX case from China to the US? Is it on the order of a couple pennies or dollars or what?
his hollywood agent?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I remember my old 386sx kit computer I bought.... Could probably buy a sports car with what I paid for it...... You've gotta love it when they know they're fscked :P /.'ed (0 Comments)
Thursday, 5-August-2004 17:19:49 (GMT +10) - by Agg
Things will be a bit slow for a while, as we're being slashdotted at the moment. Hi slashdotters!
.. my ZX81 only cost me £200 20 years ago ! OK, it doesn't do all the fancy things the new machines can do ( Email, Browsing, Word processing, Spreadsheets, Databases, Sound, CD-ripping ..) but it does all the things I need ( Door stop or ammo to sling at next doors cat when it craps on my lawn).
Art Makers Just an excuse to show photos of naked women !!
I remember the first time I saw super good deal on a HD. 10 Meg for only $1000 dollars! I'm mean to say at only $100/meg that was amazing--and that was in Early '80s dollars. A few months ago I went over a terrabyte at home with drives well under a dollar a gig.--simply amazing!
Comm has come nearly as far. I was living in Germany in the early '80s and you could get a 300 bps acoustic modem for about $350 or if you actually wanted to touch their wires you could rent a 1200 bps modem from the BundesPost for about $90/month. It was all x.25 packet back then so to connect to 'The Source' or Compuserve you got to pay about $12.50 an hour and pay per character which I later calculated at about $20/hour at 300bps.
My first months bill, just looking around at stuff, was about $800 (that is when I learned it was per character) and even though I cut back drastically, next month was $400 because of the billing cycle before I stabilized out at $70-80/month.
But it was worth it, I was hooked into the world!
It still never ceases to amaze me how far we have come in such a short time every time I look at the adverts.
I remember my first RAM expansion for my Amiga. A$120 for 8Mb! The reason I remember so vividly is that the next week, RAM prices took a dive and the same expansion cost A$80 ;)
RebateFX.com - Spread rebates for Forex traders
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I've spent a chunk of time lately playing with a Sun/Hitachi 9980. Imagine a fiber channel array of hard drives the size of a nice, hefty subzero 2-door refrigerator (2m x 2m x 1m, roughly, for 1 control module and 1 array module).
It hooks up to a dozen computers, has room for over 100TB of drivespace (raid-5), has an configuration console beyond the OS that allows some slick on-the-fly tricks, is compatible with virtually ANY OS, lets you slice the array a zillion ways, gives you a data pipe of Gigs per second, and costs a million dollars. Now that's some serious power: you could capture the entire speex-quality audio of 400 people's entire 80-year lives on it (400 x 80 x 365.25 x 24 x 3600 x 1k/s = 1.0098 x 10^15 bytes, or 100TB).
But... one day I was trying to find words for how cool this thing is, and I realized: I can remember paying a buck a byte for memory, and wincing at HD prices. I also still have a ST225, for nostalgia or whatever reason. And a 250gig drive is down around $100 now, so I'm just 2^9 away from 100TB. A conservative pseudo-Moore's law rate for HD's gets me there in 20 years: my ST225 (20Meg) is about 20 yrs. old, or 2^13 in 20 yrs).
Given the exponential rate of storage growth, I am less than 20 years from being able to buy one of these puppies at commodity prices. And by 2030 it'll fit on my wrist.
EX-cellent...
"Software too. Used to be you had to pay for an OS, or a C compiler, etc. Now $0 is a fair price."
What do you mean "use to"? Piracy is as old as the computer industry. Remember Bill Gate's "letter to hobbiests"? The whole mish-mash of software protection schemes on games, and other software.
First computer Z80 64k $5,000 (second hand)
Second computer IBM AT $5,000 (second hand)
Third computer 386/25 $5,000 (new)
Fourth computer Pentium $4,000
Fifth computer Pentium $3,000
Current computer $1,500
As a programmer I no longer need to be on the bleeding edge just to do my work. A cheap computer is sufficiently fast. My requirements of a computer have gone down in essence.
Shame I didn't know about the original request for scans. I've got a substantial magazine collection going back to at least the late 70s. The trick is finding them. I started off storing them chronilogically, but I got a huge heap from someone else all at once and they haven't been in an order since. Still, I bet I could dig up some seriously insane prices.
When perennial drunk (in the old days at least) Bob Hawke was Prime Minister, his Treasurer Paul Keating DEVALUATED the Australian dollar on purpose.
... now I'm starting to side track ... the good old days ... no police radar and V8 cars you could actually afford ... sigh !!!
Till that time I used to order everything from the U.S. as most items were cheaper when postage (across the Pacific) and import duty was factored into the price.
There was a time when 70 cents Australian was worth $1 U.S. and then there the was the price of petrol (gasoline)
A bit offtopic, but... Yes, technology is much cheaper now than in the dawn of computers... But think of all the monthly charges we've taken on as just a part of life. I can remember when all I paid were phone and electric bills... Now many of us pay $35 and up for a cell phone (on top of the land line), $30 and up for broadband, easily $50 and up for digital cable... And more.
That would have been a full-height 5.25" hard drive I would imagine it would strike you very hard.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Theres graphics cards that are 500 USD's, GeForce 6800 Ultra. In the future this will be rediculous, sense this is greater than the cost of my excellent emachine computer and monitor.
Especially with the beginning of onboard directx compatible aperatures, in the new Intel 915/925 motherboards.
When I started in this business in 1966, RAM cost $1 per bit. That's more than 25 million to 1 times more expensive than today's RAM.
More to the point, in those days a man-day of programmer's time was worth 2 or 3 bits of memory. Therefore one could justify several days of work to save a single byte. That economic was the cause of much of the often criticised spaghetti code from those days. Even when it was not true, the programmers believed that sharing a single line of code between more than one if-then-else clause was worth a month's pay.
Even today, writing for clarity as opposed to writing for performance is far from being universally accepted.
The 8MB hard drive was not more valuable 20 years ago than it is today, the currency was less valuable. Let's say an 8MB hard drive costs 8 cents today. Since it was worth 5999 dollars 20 years ago, it is reasonable to assume that the value of the Australian dollar has decreased by 74987.5% since 1984. And since the US dollar is worth only 70 Australian cents, it is also reasonable to assume that we're in even deeper shit than they are. Check the math, it's all there.
...But back in the '80's when home computers such as the Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum and MSX were popular, prices for those never ever really sky-rocketed. Compared to the way more expensive PC's at that time (AT/XT), they could do pretty much the same stuff like word processing etc, except they were used way more as gaming computers (and had way better & nicer games at the time than PC's).
The price I pay is not what I could GET for a certain price, it is what I can afford for a certain price.
For me on average the computers I bought are the same price. I look at my budget and with that I buy a new computer. If I would have 6000$ now as a budget, I am sure I will find a PC that will match that.
So a more interesting thing would be how the change in anual $ per person is compared to then. Remember that then there were a LOT of people who did not even HAVE a PC, so the amount will be 0 and increasing.
People will have a treschhold on when to buy. When the amount drops enough, they will buy. At 6000$ almost nobody bought, at 600$ there will be a lot more. At 6$ still more.
Demand increases production.
Production lowers prices.
Lower prices increase demand.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Sure when you compare byte-for-byte, the price has dropped dramatically over 20 years.
But when you compare price of a typical user's system, is the difference really that much?
Today a typical office desktop machine would be around 1000 euro (or US$). That is also what I paid for my first computer in 1980. Of course it had 16K instead of 512M of RAM, a tape recorder instead of a 120GB harddisk drive, a 2 MHz Z-80 processor instead of a 3 GHz Pentium 4, but the users of that time bought it for the same purpose as the users of today.
So while you get a lot more for your money today, it is not like the price of a desktop system dropped from 'about the same as a car' to 'about the same as a candybar'.
I remember seeing one of Tandy's first PC-compatibles for $5100 CDN. I don't remember if that included a monitor -- I think it included a CGA one. That must have been a 386 at most.
A very long time ago, I read a short story about a programmer who is given a 1Meg upgrade for his C64 (I think) by aliens. He was totaly amazed when his trusty C64 boots up with "1048578 BASIC Bytes Free" instead of "38911 BASIC Bytes Free". Today I could lose many times that much RAM and not even notice
Art Makers Just an excuse to show photos of naked women !!
I remember as the only "developer" at a company got the fastest computer in the officea 486dx2 50Mhz. (~12 years ago) It was so fast that people came round just to look at it.
New thinking, old and new games
factor in inflation, and the fact that most everything else has gone up in price for the equivilent item.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
A lot of people are saying that they pay the same amout for a computer today, as they did 10 or 20 years ago. But if you factor in inflation, you are paying less.
Plus, most things go up in price for the equivilent product.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
In 1988 I upgrade the company's 286 desktop from, I think, 5 MB to 30 MB. It was much cheaper to fly from Japan to Singapore, buy a drive and fly back, than to purchase locally.
Not long after, I built the company's first drive rack out of unexpectedly big, heavy full-height 5" drives, learning in the process how important spindle sync can be. I can't remember the cost, but I do remember the company CEO pointing out that I got the drives instead of him getting his new company car.
We also had the local Apple rep try to "unsell" us our Laserwriter, because he couldn't believe it was working with a PC.
Not only was everything expensive, companies were learning only slightly faster than their customers.
#!/bin/pseudoperl
#
# Replacement for average user
# v.1b
use Game;
while (1){
while ( period = "waking hours" && tsr = "working" ){
$input = game;
);
sleep (5 hrs);
};
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
that everybody know Australa is populate by thieves, and therefore stole the computer anyways. ;)
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Thanks for the server stress-test! We've tweaked the config a fair bit and things look happier now. If you had trouble reading the article earlier, sorry about that. Should be good to go now, touch wood. :)
Did you 1000 computer from 1980 have a printer? A monitor? Disk drives?
I think not. With this stuff, even 1986 a cpc6128 cost 2000+.
1980 a simple disk drive cost more then a whole pc now. A 9.6k modem was more expensive than a tft monitor. A 4MB EISA Gfx card 1990 was more expensive than a dual cpu DELL server today.
and thats not even considering inflation.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
great story. REALLY GREAT! Extraordinary pieces of hardware are ALWAYS expensive.
Sigh. Slashdot seems like getting dumb.
Excellent little bit of economics there incast. Short, accurate & to the point. I'd have liked to have writted that :)
Is anyone surpised that hardware gets cheaper over time? This has been going on as long as people have been selling computer equipment. I was looking through a filing cabinet the other day and found the original invoices for my first computer (Apple IIe) and the hard drive for my first PC (540MB, at the time it was huuuuge amount of storage). Their respective prices IIRC were about $3,000 and $500.
With $3,000 I could buy at least 4 of my current systems, each of which would be well over 1,000 times faster.
... no mysterious slow-down in your OS over a period of months (KDE, why do you do that????).... Your computer is begging you to dump KDE and install WindowMaker, you insensitive clod!
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
<eyes watering>
Ah, memories... the Tandy 1400 LT was my first home computer. I must have been around 9 at the time. Before that, I always played on friends' computers (C64, Atari, Neckermann etc.) or on the Siemens and VAX systems at my father's lab.
I remember getting to know DOS the hard way, because nobody told me to use "dir" to look for "*.exe" files (once I knew, I executed just about anything I could find...)
Later, I spent weeks "optimizing" boot time by using a RAM disk and playing LHX Attack Chopper on its CGA display. Luckily, I didn't go blind.
Today, its mostly Macs, my Sun and my NextStation running OS X, Linux, OpenBSD and NeXTStep... MS-DOS 6.0 was bloated after all, so I never checked with Microsoft again.
I inherited a copy of EA from about 1971 which featured a "build your own computer" project. It had words to the effect of
"we decided not to use one of the 'new fangled' microprocessors"
I think it had about 64 bytes (yes, bytes) of memory and was done in 7400 series logic!
...boy I'm glad my life isn't more like 1983! Those prices...eek!
Sony ha
"The issue with really fast systems is really bad and bloated software is allowed." To really get performance, run 20th century software on 21st century hardware. Now that's a performant system.
Flash git! I had 5K of RAM and a 1Mhz processor and I loved it. By using the entire memory and loading text from tape I got it to display 40 columns of text! (4 pixel wide characters)... :-)
Actually I think prices never changed. For example, over the last 15 years or so, I've alwasy spent 100$ for a reasonable amount of memory, every time I needed a memory upgrade. Of course the amount changed, but if you buy a "reasonble" PC today, you end up spending the same money you spent for an Amiga 500 in 1989.
On that price basis, I worked out that 1GB of memory would have cost me over 1 million dollars at the time.
No, I'm not talking about Geo. Orwell, I'm talking about the first year of the Mac. I've probably still got the ads for the 128k Mac...I know I've got copies of MacWorld and MacUser from back then, when I bought mine at an Air Base in Germany...if I recall correctly for around $1800
I moved up to the 512ke, and then paid over $4000 for the Mac II in 1987, $1200 for a 12" Sony color monitor, another $1400 for an 80M disk drive, and around another $1000 for 1M of RAM! Yes, prices are a bit better these days.
Just another day in Paradise
They are walking along the street when the trader sees a dollar laying on the ground and says to the economist "there's a dollar laying there on the ground". As the trader picks up the dollar, the economist chuckles and exclaims that it cannot possibly be, since if it really was a dollar someone would have already picked it up. So the trader examines the dollar and tells the economist that it is, in fact, a real dollar, and chuckles at the economist's folly. "Well that may be true" the economist responds, "but it's not on the ground anymore."
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
Why is it that anything more than $5 or $10 is too much for anything to do with a computer these days?
Everyday I get customers come in and when you tell them it will cost them $100 AUD per hour for labour, or $300 for XP they scream blue murder.
"But my neighbours friends son told me it was just something cheap and blah blah blah..."
God forbid they are stupid enough to have no backups when their HDD dies, or a virus corrupts their filesystem. Sure, I can get it back your data but it will cost about $200 in labour.
"What do you mean I have to pay for it??"
IT work is just expected to be free, all because of that damn Billy kid down the street who "knows computers".
i hate pansy republicans
but more interested in the relative prices for equipment back then compared to the now. .
Say a harddisk of 8 Mb cost 6000 dollars in 1970 - what did the minimum (lowest price) computer specification that could use this harddrive cost back then ? Divide those prices and you get the relative price-index for the combination HD/PC
Compare that to the same index in the current era (ie. (minimum price for HD with size X) divided by (price for a minimum PC)), and you'll get some numbers that start to interest me.
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
I bought a whole TRS-80 set up when I was 16 or 17 and learning to program in BASIC. I recall the floppy drive expansion interface cost me $750. The whole set up cost me $3500 CDN in 1980.
I had no idea it would be so short lived and obsoleted in 2 years.
I thought I was making an investment in my future as a computing professional.
I couldn't afford to do it again and never bought a computer or even something similar to it until 1997 when it seemed that things were becoming more stable and upgradable with the Pentium I. And there was that Internet thing that made it more interesting! Note that even today, 7 years later, the P-I is useable today as a web browsing and email platform.
omicoo--
Ohhh crap I remember some of that stuff. I played Cyberia 2!
Man this is giving me all kinds of crazy nostalgia.
Presently here, but not there.
Remember when a Sparcstation 330 was $80,000+ consider it had the same MIPS as a 486DX33.
As PC's goes, the office I shared at my first good IT job had an IBM 286 in it. With 30MB HD, two 5.25 Floppies, EGA card, 512K of memory. Cost $14,000. It was the first model of 286 running a brisk 6MHz. I think it was a 5160
Ah, blee^H^H^H^Hcutting edge.
I'm from the state of South Australia, which was started by a company - The South Australia Company.
Even now, only a very small portion of SA's population are serial killers (Snowtown) or terrorists (David Hicks).
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
Not only that, but each new drive has been bigger than all the previous ones put together! Same thing is happening to me. 40MB, 500MB, 2GB, 4GB, 30GB. I'm not certain this trend will continue.
"This is crazy, you realise we could all go to jail for this?" - my manager, somewhere I used to work.
The genuine P5 64bit cpu at 60 MHZ. PCI bus with........
What would you do without a monitor? Sit and look stupid behind a keyboard and a mouse
... $350.00 for a set of 8 4116 300ns (16K) RAM chips. And it was a fair price! --M
Insightful? Hardly. I'm sure it was meant to be a joke based on the origins of the British-Australian immigrants.
Since when are PCs and compatibles the only computers? Back in the 80s, HOME computers were quite cheap, on par with what we'd pay today for a commodity PC today.
;)
In 1983, you could get a complete Commodore 64 System (Montior and floppy drive included) for ~$730 US. Basically, everything you would need (word processing, games etc...)
20 years later, you'd be getting a very good deal to get a modern system for that price. Sure the technology is much more advanced today, but in the end you get the same amount done, for the same price.
Of course, let's not talk about modem prices
One of the places I worked in had computer labs with PC's exactly like those (assembled by a local suppler). Except each system also had "Turbo button". The idea was that if you wanted extra computing power for a particular task, you could press this button, and the system clock would be boosted up from 8.00Mhz to 16.00Mhz.
Usually, every user would just keep the turbo button on all the time, only releasing it to play some game which wasn't time synchronised (dragnfly.exe).
Later PC's actually had a LED display which displayed the clock speed at the front. Our technician once had to to repair a system because a user complained the turbo button wasn't changing the displayed speed. Rather unsurprisingly, we found out that the turbo button was only hardwired to the input pins of the LED display and the cooling fan motor. Pressing the Turbo button had no effect except to rev the cooling fan and make the PC sound a little louder.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
I seem to remember an old "law" that went something like "The computer you want will always cost $5000". I think it still pretty much holds true....
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
...it was used in *way* overpriced machines, ranging all the way up to US$10,000. Remember, at the time it was a top of the line super processor.
Sure your $3000 would get you 4 of your current system, but you are comparing apples and oranges (pun intended).
Consider what the IIe and the 540MB drive were at the time, absolutely top-of-the line stuff.
You need to compare that with what is currently top-of-the line.
The price will be about the same.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
I think it's about time to replace the punched card system. My first computer was an abacus.
The abacus is about as close to looking at the Matrix through a monitor as you get in real technology. The I/O is completely left to the interpretation of the user but the interpretation is typically still plausible. I never could interpret any punched card.
I was hoping to upgrade to a slide rule.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
No computer vendor in their right mind ought to hold much inventory in new computers with the expedited rate of depreciation that applies to them - I think it's gotta be even worse than cars or mobile homes.
Somewhere I recall a figure of 1.5% per week, but I"m not positive about that. But neither would I be surprised.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
A more interesting approach would be to look at a year over year pricing for three categories of retail computer gear. The idea is that the state of the art changes, but the pricepoint consumers pay for "current" gear has remained pretty constant until very recently. I go back to about 1985 with these numbers and there will be dissagreement about the specifics, but I think we'll all agree that the TREND is right.
Low end -- which used to be around $800 and recently is closer to $400
Average desktop -- Which used to be around $1500 and lately is between $600 and $800
And high-end desktop -- which used to be around $2500 and now runs around $1800
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
I still remember when a 20 MB Seagate ST225 hard drive with controller was something like US$500 back in 1985! =:-O
Today, you can get three 200 GB Serial ATA hard drives for that same price--and still have pocket change left.
I remember that being the cover of PC-Magazine in (I think) 1989.
;-)
The Price? It was posted on the cover in big-bold letters at a mere $10,000.
It was probably only a couple issues later where they announced that the "386 is dead".
Maybe Australia started as a penal colony. But I am afraid the U.S. may end up as one: with the largest per capita incarceration rate and limits on court access for certain crimes and secret wire taps, searches and seizures, everyday seems to bring the country as a whole in to a police state. Didn't we fight a war against a government that tried to this sort of thing once before ?
Just think, 20 years from now we'll be nostalgic about when we had to pay SCO "ONLY" $699 for Linux.
I read the conclusion of this story and have a comment: These were not hobbist computers and parts. Instead they were really what at the time were called Business Systems. Byte in those days was subtitled something like "For Small and Business Systems" making a case for the classification of these computers and their use. I worked in 1981 for a small company selling "Business Systems" (ZR Computers). The $6000AU disk drive was for businesses, not the home computer owner. NASCOM-1's were for Home buyers, as were many smaller Z80 / CP/M systems (Trash 80 and Sharp MZ80's come to mind).
My first job for ZR was to work with a 'network' of 3 Commodore 8096 PET's that used a single Commodore 10MB disk unit. 2 computers used the the IEEE-488 bus to access the Hard drive, the other used the network to communicate with one of the drive connected PET's to get it's data. I called it Master/Slave. But what did I know about political correctness. This drive was a 5000 Pound UK drive unit, at a time when the Pound was worth something (!)
The software I wrote, a machine tool parts catalogue, was billed out at 400 pounds UK (say $800) and took me about 6 months to write. I was paid 3000 pounds / annum, therefore the software cost ZR, even at my stunningly low wage rate, 1100 pounds. Business idiocy is not something new!!
I have an almost mint condition RadioShack Tandy catalogue from 1981. In it is offered a 9.0 MB hard drive for US $ 5999. They also introduced the NEW and IMPROVED 16-bit Tandys. I got this catalogue while my grandfather was cleaning out his closet. I noticed a bunch of old magazines lying on the floor in the trash pile, and right on top was this catalogue. What a find!
$6,000 in 1983 was enough to buy a brand new compact car. In fact, the previous year, my parents purchased a Chevrolet Citation X11 V6 for about $9k. (more of a 2-door sedan) American or Aussie dollars...doesn't matter...that was a lot of coin from back then.
Unfortunately, I can't find a good Internet link to new car prices from that era...and I don't have any of my dad's Kelley Blue Books from then either.
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
Eh.... Sometimes I'm tempted to make a similar statement, that "Today's PCs really aren't THAT much more useful than the ones I used 10 or 12 years ago!"
But then I think about the tasks people do with modern computers, and I realize that statement is short-sighted.
Yes, you can argue the old favorite, that "I could type a letter just as well on my old XXX system as on today's Pentium 4 3.0Ghz PC!", or "Spreadsheets worked just fine for me using Visicalc."
The value of faster machines becomes immediately apparent when you start talking about such things as editing DV video from a camcorder, or printing out photo quality prints after downloading from from your multi megapixel digital camera and editing them, or encoding your music CDs into MP3 format. Heck - try just *listening* to MP3s in the background while you work using anything older than a Pentium class PC. The older systems tie up their entire CPU just processing the music file.
Anyone developing software can surely tell you that compiling times are drastically reduced on modern PCs, as well. No more "Running off to eat dinner while my program compiles." And how about people composing music on their computer? Sure, the old machines handled MIDI data fairly well - but virtual instruments? That was just a fantasy before modern systems made it possible.
Gaming is always debatable, because it's subjective. One person can rave about how many thousands of times better new games are with near photo-realistic graphics and 3 dimensional surround sound, while another scoffs at that, and says they preferred the "block graphics" type games of the Atari 2600 game system era. But surely, it's clear that gaming has accomplished things that just weren't possible on older hardware. Network gameplay is vastly superior, for example. (I can remember trying to play the first 2-player modem-based games. You had to wait for the game to "synch up" with the other player before you could start, and then it often lost synch in the middle of playing, due to phone line noise or whatnot.)
You wouldn't even have things like usable broadband internet access if the world was still using 4.77Mhz XT class machines. It takes more CPU power than that to handle things like PPPoE protocol for DSL!
How did this make it on, must be a slow news day. Soon we will have an article pointing out, in shocking fashion, that hardware just keeps getting faster and that electronics are getting smaller... even in Australia! Andrew
Many many years ago, I purchased a 52Mb External hard drive (my first) for $310. I was amazed at the freedom from floppies that it gave me and I was so enamoured with it that I told my wife that it was all the space I would ever possibly need, and that I would never need to buy another hard drive. (that's how I got the $310)
I still have the drive, and it is used daily... so are about 900 Gigs worth of it's brothers, but to this day any request for money for computer equipment is met with a quote like "yeah, right, just like that hard drive of yours" from the wife.
Reality is all that stuff that doesn't care if you believe in it or not.--Solomon Short
I was helping a friend clean out his garage. (That's where he stores his piles for spare hardware.)
We we sorting things into boxes by category, when he comes over to me, holding a shit-load of SIMMs. They were rubber-banded in a cylinder shape. There were so many, he could barely hold them together.
"These are one-meg chips," he says. "By my estimate, this bundle retailed for 1.2 million dollars when they were new."
"What're they worth today?" I asked.
"Maybe a few pennies each."
Fuckin' A.
I bought a 386SX-20 with an IIT math coprocessor in 1990 I believe it was; paid about $2100 canadian.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Bah! Why, back in my day, an upgrade for the rocks we were banging together cost like 100 deer hides! And we liked it!
... a good reason to run Debian.
Only half kidding here.
Software is like a bicycle -- better tools enable you to do better things. However, there comes a point where you're better off riding the bicycle more often than spending all your time tinkering with it and upgrading it.
> How does $5999 for an 8.6MB hard drive strike
> you? For reference, 1 Australian Dollar is
> worth 70 to 80 US cents.
prices like that were from before the australian dollar was floated in the mid 80s. at that time, $AUD1.00 was worth about $US1.50. so, $6K australian was about $9K american (although there's shipping and duty and a few more layers of middlemen markup in that $6K price).
since then, currency speculators and other parasitic vermin have had the same influence on our economy as they do on many others.
Take a look at this one http://www.overclockers.com.au/image.php?pic=artic les/296910/ad1.jpg
It says the old pentium (586?) was a 64bit CPU. that aint right, is it?
"If you loved me, you`d all kill yourselves today"
Spider Jerusalem
- I was adjusting for inflation
- It was a long time ago
- They saw me coming
- All of the above
Have fun PeterArt Makers Just an excuse to show photos of naked women !!
I sold some 16kb, S-100 memory boards for $1300.00 each in 1980. In those days $81,250,000,000, would have purchased a GB.
$50.00 for a box of disk or a printer cable. My Ratshack Model 1 had a memory upgrade of 4kb for $499.00.
"You can tell the pioneers by the arrows in their backs"
But what I find (esp on non-true Unix/X machines) is that doing the SAME tasks is no faster.
Great, closing a window makes a pretty little animation kick off. Joy! MS Word has every feature in it that was every suggested by anyone including MS programmers on their first drunk trying to impress a girl.
And yes, when the 4.77MHz XTs came out, I *was* playing on a 1.5Mb/s line on the Vax (with 1MB of RAM).
Is PPPoE there because it's BEST and EFFICIENT? Or is it in use because, well, we could get it out quick, our vendor for modems supports it and people have CPU to burn?
SUV think.
Yes, any 486/66 can handle current broadband speeds just fine (I firewall/route 2 WiFi + 3mb/s cable with an 8 watt 486/133 that's as silent as my 8 port netgear switch).
You bring up gaming, but gaming is the leading factor in video and machine acceleration in home machines. DDR Ram is largely motivated by gamers. (hell, I've spent $30,000 on a bleeding edge SGI video card that as fast as the $30 "deal bin" card I tossed in a friend's machine).
RE: Old machines?
I was asked to recover a BUNCH of (well preserved and stored) disks from a Z80 CP/M system. I found a program that would run (and read/write) CP/M programs under DOS and found DOS disks.
Shoved a 5 1/4" drive into an (old) 800MHz machine and kicked up WordStar. Somehow the fingers remembered.
The friend was stunned at the speed as I whipped through the files looking for something. "How come my new windows machine isn't this fast?"
Well, wordstar can't send email or do bad grammar checking as you type can it?
That said, a friend's mom is a novelist and using WordPerfect 5.1 to write in.
A simple electronic typewriter that doesn't annoy her with underlines or other visual crud while she's focusing on composition and tying together plot lines and developing characters. A spelling mistake should not interrupt the train of thought. That's why you spell check afterwards (or have Jr Editors at the publishing house).
The overall point is that app programmers and OS writers are giving us crap - lots of little fluff without, by and large, much innovation.
Star/Open Office seek to emulate MS Office for acceptance sake, but non of them offer any new ways of trying to come to me, the user, to help me in my tasks.
My mom still has to remember to "Save" a file. - but it's right there, why is it MY job to do this when the computer that's really 3 orders of magnitude more powerful is not doing anything.
Radical research into user interface design, operating systems and in specific Human Computer Interface design within apps is pathetic.
AutoCAD, by and large, is the same program I ran on SPARC 1s in 1991.
There are few (mainstream and findable) "idea managers" like Think!
Apple *used* to encourage and offer a forum for interesting new ideas in computing,but at this point they're scrambling to keep any ISVs and backfilling holes in their portfolio (see addressbook, iTunes, etc).
We live in a time of Unnovation.