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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 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/
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".
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.
- The 8088 sucked. Z80 with better carburators.
//.) I was delighted to move from 68000->68040 without having to redesign software. Microcontroller makers passing them off as microprocessors.
- 4.77MHz.
I still find that my 30MHz Sparc 2 running fvwm wasn't a ton less useful than my current FreeBSD setup.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
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 *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.
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.
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.
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
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!