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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 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/
Software too. Used to be you had to pay for an OS, or a C compiler, etc. Now $0 is a fair price.
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?
On that price basis, I worked out that 1GB of memory would have cost me over 1 million dollars at the time.
"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."
.wav was already ripped). The systems were vastly different in terms of OS, RAM, hard drives, etc... but were representative of their generation IMHO. The reduction in encoding times was pretty much what one would expect based on MHz ratings.)
Part of the problem is that users haven't kept up with their computers. A desktop computer's CPU is fairly idle, waiting either for the user to do something or for some kind of I/O. Eight-bit computers were able to do tolerable GUIs with WYSIWYG applications -- but having less responsiveness, no multitasking, limited task switching, and none of the flexibility of today's systems.
Try doing something CPU intensive -- you may find that your NeXT really is a fraction of the speed of your PPC. (Just out of curiosity, I timed my computer systems a few years ago by making an MP3 with LAME (the
Bloat can be a real problem. But one person's bloat is another person's feature. And with so many idle CPU cycles, it's a no-brainer to add more features.
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!