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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?
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.
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".
"Time Warp Computer Pricing Revealed"
And yet the cost of computer magazines have gone up. $12 for a Linux magazine with a CD.
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.
"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?"
Well, we've sent out more traffic than this in the past, in terms of bytes/sec. So large images aren't too much of a concern for us. I figured it was the usual servers-dying slashdot effect, but they're both coping fine. Current theory is that we're being capped on a router or something. Anyhoo, site is working, but slow.
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?
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.
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.
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.
When I started in this business in 1966, RAM cost $1 per bit. That's more than 25 million to 1 times more expensive than today's RAM.
More to the point, in those days a man-day of programmer's time was worth 2 or 3 bits of memory. Therefore one could justify several days of work to save a single byte. That economic was the cause of much of the often criticised spaghetti code from those days. Even when it was not true, the programmers believed that sharing a single line of code between more than one if-then-else clause was worth a month's pay.
Even today, writing for clarity as opposed to writing for performance is far from being universally accepted.
that everybody know Australa is populate by thieves, and therefore stole the computer anyways. ;)
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Is anyone surpised that hardware gets cheaper over time?
What really is surprising is that it continues to happen. There is nothing about the universe that guarantees cheaper and better products will be produced over time. It is only human cleverness that sustains this progress. That applies to most products.
"The issue with really fast systems is really bad and bloated software is allowed." To really get performance, run 20th century software on 21st century hardware. Now that's a performant system.
Actually I think prices never changed. For example, over the last 15 years or so, I've alwasy spent 100$ 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
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
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.
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".
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!