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."

Comments

Australian Dollar?

[dnahelix]

Has the Australian Dollar always been worth 70 to 80 US cents?

Re:Australian Dollar?

[hazem]

It seems to me that you cannot use the poster's "1 Australian Dollar is worth 70 to 80 US cents" to make a meaningful evaluation of a harddrive costing Australian $5999 at some time in the past.

To get a meaningful comparison, you'd either need to adjust the $5999 for inflation of the $Australian, THEN convert to dollars, OR convert the $Austrialian to $USD way back then, THEN adjust for the inflation of the $USD.

I'm not sure if you'll get the same results. I doubt that currency conversions and inflation rates are path-independent. Otherwise, arbitrage would seem to be possible.

Any economists out there?

reasonable

[schneidafunk]

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.

not *that* amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:not *that* amazing

[servognome]

Think the nostalgia has clouded your vision.
DRM - Those 5 1/4 disks had anti-copying features. Try to copy and they made a terrible grating sound. Thats why there were programs like Copy II Plus, and Locksmith, to circumvent the copy protection (I think it was some intentionally bad sectors on the disk). Not to mention the other ghetto anti-piracy features, like code wheels, and "find the 3rd word of the second paragraph of page 6"
Crashes - There were horrible compatibility issues. Lots of games made you select from a list of components for video and sound. Alot of times my stuff wasn't on the list (darn you Tandy!). So I'd end up with junky graphics, and/or glitchy or non-working sound. Later on sound cards (like the first sound blaster) would randomly crash your system if things weren't setup just right (IRQs, memory addresses). Then when the first dedicated video cards started coming out they were the random crasher.
Internet - No, but there were BBS's which were as good, or bad as the internet. Chat, door games, message boards and 125k pr0n file... just start downloading and come back the next day.
Solitaire - Solitaire has always existed. This program references one version made in 1985.

Mysterious slow downs - No, pretty much everything was slow so didn't matter. Of course to get certain things running you'd have to mess around with the autoexec.bat and config.sys files to free up enough main memory, 640k my ass billy G!

Re:I still remember 8088 was hot

[MrChuck]

1. The 8088 sucked. Z80 with better carburators.
   Segments.
   The 68000 came out soon after and would have spared us YEARS of working around stupid ickiness that Intel foisted on us (like bank switching which should have died with the Apple //.) I was delighted to move from 68000->68040 without having to redesign software. Microcontroller makers passing them off as microprocessors.
2. 4.77MHz.
   Skipping predictive branching, caching up the kazoo and that current chips are closer to RISC than CISC classic, etc:
   Is your 2000MHz Athlon 400 times more useful than the XT? (adding in variables, and DDR it's several THOUSAND times more powerful).

I still find that my 30MHz Sparc 2 running fvwm wasn't a ton less useful than my current FreeBSD setup.

I *know* that my 40MHz NeXT (in the office) isn't 1/20th the speed of my 867MHz (RISC) PPC.

The issue with really fast systems is really bad and bloated software is allowed.

Re:newsflash

[ron_ivi]

Personally, I'd rather pay/donate/whatever for these guys to make _new_ advances.

A C compiler, relational databse, and OS are such mature technology, I don't see paying much more for them than I would a screwdriver, 2x4, or plastic bag.

New stuff -- facial-expression-recognition-input-devices, 3D heads up displays, a computer that understands my mood -- that's what I'd be happy to pay for (open source or not).

Not to date myself, but ...

[anorlunda]

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.