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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."
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....
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.
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.
Software too. Used to be you had to pay for an OS, or a C compiler, etc. Now $0 is a fair price.
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?
The theory I heard was that it was to force the cashier to open the till (to get the customer's change), thus making it harder for them to simply pocket the money as the customer turned away.
I also imagine that there's an element of truth to the marketing angle, of 49.99 being advertised as "under 50!" and seeming cheaper subconsciously.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
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.
The way I see it, the initial cost is $0. If you find it worth while, it's worth paying a few bucks for. That reminds me, it's about time to pay my tribute to a few of the groups I use their stuff frequently. Time to buy a round of CD's and T-shirts to give away to friends. :)
:)
My Slackware hat is starting to look kind of ratty, I guess I should get one for myself too.
If I ever bump into Linus in real life, I'm going to take him out drinking.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Thats something I love about Australia, that I know will severely annoy me should I ever travel to the USA. In Australia the price shown on the item/menu/shelf/whatever, is the price you pay for it. If it says $5.95 on the price tag, you pay $5.95 at the register. Taxes are already added in (items which attract the GST are marked as such on the reciept), and you aren't expected to tip anyone for anything. Incidentally I never quite got tipping. To me its your employers job to pay you to serve me, not mine. If your boss doesn't want to pay you, they should set up as a self service business. I would expect the cost of providing service to be factored into the total cost, not tacked on at the end.
Why not get the real ultimate power?
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.
I started working as a mainframe operator for a financial company in 1990.
At home around that time, I had a 486/DX33 with 1 MB of RAM and a 256MB hard disk.
At work, we had a data centre full of these refrigerator sized IBM 3390-1 disk boxes that held a massive 1GB. These were slowly being replaced by the new 3390-3 (er, 3GB). I *think* a single drive was about $US30,000. We bought them in strings of 8 or 16 or more.
Tape was cheap and plentiful at $100 for a 200MB tape. The place I worked at had a library of 70,000 active tapes.
Serving Suggestion: Defrost
I actually tried something similar. The mother of a friend had bought an old second hand machine that wouldnt accept an IDE CD-ROM drive yet. So I took out the hard drive and installed windows 3.1 on my own machine to put back the drive later. Sure enough, win 3.1 absolutely *flies* on a 233 MHz pentium.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
Actually I think prices never changed. For example, over the last 15 years or so, I've alwasy spent 100$ 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
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????).
Damn you wipper-snappers (in my 40's), I wax nostalgic for the days when if you had a disk you were probably rich, cuz they were only available on mini, midi, or main-frames. I was lucky enough to be a technician back in the mid '70s, and enjoyed many a day repairing multi-platter disk crashes.
Just another day in Paradise
Later on sound cards (like the first sound blaster) would randomly crash your system if things weren't setup just right (IRQs, memory addresses).
Tell me about it.
2nd printer port, defult address IRQ 5
sound card, prefered address IRQ 5
SCSI card, default address IRQ 5
Network adapter, default address IRQ 5
QIC02 adapter, Default address IRQ 5
8 slots, everything set to IRQ 5. Common problem. Who needs to use their modem, tapedrive, scsi card, etc...etc.. at the same time anyway.
Com1/Com2 default IRQ4/3 respectivly
Internal modem com3/com4 default irq4/3
Mouse not working when you go online, well who needs it anyway. AOL not working because your internal modem set to a diffrent IRQ, not their fault!
And not to speak of pre vesa video cards. Either you were fortunate enough to get 8bit color in a game, or you were screwed if your chipset wasn't supported.
While there are those days I'd like a good old dos application to do some tedius tasks... for the most part the good old days were pretty horrible.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Don't be silly. Humans have 'knowledge' of the future in the same way we have 'knowledge' of the far past: by popular convention. For example, I 'know' that the sun will rise tomorrow. Is there a chance that it won't? Sure. However, I 'know' that it will be there tomorrow morning, just as always. I am sure I 'know' more about what will happen tomorrow, but unless you're willing to wager there's no point showing off.
http://xkcd.com/386/
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
You charge. . . .money? All it used to take was a 2-liter bottle of Pepsi (or Dr. Pepper) and a bag of Doritos. Or a medium pizza and a sixer of decent beer if it was a problem that took all night.
Back then, though, I was receiving help from people that got paid for their computer skills during the day*. And they weren't solving my computer problems so much as teaching me to solve my computer problems.
Of course, they were trying to make me into one of them. Obviously, they succeeded.
*I think many were suprised that they were getting paid good money for what they would have done for pepsi and doritos or pizza and beer. Or other intoxicants. =)
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
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!