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

Look at more recent stuff

[metalac]

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.

Re:Look at more recent stuff

[ron_ivi]

Ray Kurzweil has made some pretty well thought through predictions that by 2030 a $1000 computer will be far more powerful than the human brain. By the end of the century, he predicts a typical computer will have more computation power than _all_ human brains put together.

If these trends continue, we're in for a very intereseting time.

And Ray isn't just any old crackpot. He has a good track record at not just forseeing the future, but executing well on it - he's responsible for the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition....

And yet, little seems to have changed...

[jkrise]

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.

How silly

[Turn-X Alphonse]

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.

Hard Drives

[Brainix]

Every hard drive I've bought has been bigger than every previous hard drive I've bought combined. (40 MB, 200 MB, 2 GB, 4 GB, 20 GB.)

I hope my children will be able to make similar claims.

Re:newsflash

[ron_ivi]

Software too. Used to be you had to pay for an OS, or a C compiler, etc. Now $0 is a fair price.

Re:How

[AnotherFreakboy]

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.