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

newsflash

[Anonymous Coward]

Hardware prices drop over time.

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:newsflash

[ron_ivi]

Personally, I'd rather pay/donate/whatever for these guys to make _new_ advances.

A C compiler, relational databse, and OS are such mature technology, I don't see paying much more for them than I would a screwdriver, 2x4, or plastic bag.

New stuff -- facial-expression-recognition-input-devices, 3D heads up displays, a computer that understands my mood -- that's what I'd be happy to pay for (open source or not).

Australian Dollar?

[dnahelix]

Has the Australian Dollar always been worth 70 to 80 US cents?

Re:Australian Dollar?

[MasterB(G)ates]

10 year performance of the Aussie dollar compared to The Yank

http://www.ela.co.nz/CurrencyGraph.class.php?ela__ relative=AUD&ela__base=USD&UmsSession=6ef5cf65e96f 39657787d73633e3de9c

Re:Australian Dollar?

[hazem]

It seems to me that you cannot use the poster's "1 Australian Dollar is worth 70 to 80 US cents" to make a meaningful evaluation of a harddrive costing Australian $5999 at some time in the past.

To get a meaningful comparison, you'd either need to adjust the $5999 for inflation of the $Australian, THEN convert to dollars, OR convert the $Austrialian to $USD way back then, THEN adjust for the inflation of the $USD.

I'm not sure if you'll get the same results. I doubt that currency conversions and inflation rates are path-independent. Otherwise, arbitrage would seem to be possible.

Any economists out there?

Re:Australian Dollar?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Government *wants* it to fall (good for exports), but it all depends on the economy in the rest of the world. The US economy has been in a bit of a rut lately, so they have low interest rates to stimulate the economy. Much of the rest of the world is in a similar position. On the other hand, Australia's economy has been steady, so interest rates are high by international standards. As a result, investors put their money into Australia to get better returns. This drove the dollar up.

Once the interest rates elsewhere rise, money will flow out of Australia, driving the AUD down. So, I guess all you can hope for is US interest rate rises.

The current position of the AUD at 70 cents is actually pretty close to its long-term stable position, but I have a gut feeling that when rate rises occur in the US, it will dip back down to the 60 cent mark (I could be wrong though).

Re:Australian Dollar?

[tarunthegreat2]

Oh For the love of God, get an education in economics. Currencies don't really represent the strength of your economy, they're a measure of a lot of other things (of course, if your currency is tanking by more 10%, I think it's safe to say the economy is bad). Currencies that float mostly represent trade imbalances. The middle eastern currencies are almost worth 2 US$ - hint:The world depends on the middle east for a critical resource...
If you want your country to export more, you try and devalue your currency, if you want to reduce inflation, your currency may start rising, blah blah. Currency and economic strength are not always directly related.

Re:Australian Dollar?

[incast]

I am an economist... a young one, but one nonetheless!

In a perfect world, the exchange rate will adjust perfectly to inflation. However, in our world, thanks to imperfect information, inflation and exchange rates will vary in the short run. Arbitrage does exist, as humans do not have perfect knowlege of the future. We can make ex ante predictions, but we will still end up with ex post deviations from such predictions.

SO.. if you're adventurous, try a job in currency exchange markets to make (or lose) a buck or two!

reasonable

[schneidafunk]

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.

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....

Re:Look at more recent stuff

[JWSmythe]

Judging by most of the computer "users" I've met, computers surpassed the average users mental capabilities in about 1998. :)

Most users can be replaced by a simple shell script anyways, so that wasn't hard to prove.

#!/bin/pseudoperl
#
# Replacement for average user
# v1.0b

use ICQ;
use email;
use browser;

while (1){
while ( period = "waking hours" ){
$input = browse( randsite() );
send_icq( To => randuser(),
Message => "$input ! hahaha!");

$input = read_mail();
send_email (forward_message());
);
sleep (8 hrs);
};

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.

/.'ed

[Joey Patterson]

I hope that site wasn't hosted on a 128K Mac that they brought here in a flying DeLorean.

How

[Julian Morrison]

...does $5999 for an 8.6MB hard drive strike you?

As silly. I mean, why didn't they want that one more dollar?

Re:How

[eingram]

So they could advertise, "8.6MB hard drive now LESS THAN $6,000!"

Woo! Sign me up.

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.

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.

not *that* amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:not *that* amazing

[servognome]

Think the nostalgia has clouded your vision.
DRM - Those 5 1/4 disks had anti-copying features. Try to copy and they made a terrible grating sound. Thats why there were programs like Copy II Plus, and Locksmith, to circumvent the copy protection (I think it was some intentionally bad sectors on the disk). Not to mention the other ghetto anti-piracy features, like code wheels, and "find the 3rd word of the second paragraph of page 6"
Crashes - There were horrible compatibility issues. Lots of games made you select from a list of components for video and sound. Alot of times my stuff wasn't on the list (darn you Tandy!). So I'd end up with junky graphics, and/or glitchy or non-working sound. Later on sound cards (like the first sound blaster) would randomly crash your system if things weren't setup just right (IRQs, memory addresses). Then when the first dedicated video cards started coming out they were the random crasher.
Internet - No, but there were BBS's which were as good, or bad as the internet. Chat, door games, message boards and 125k pr0n file... just start downloading and come back the next day.
Solitaire - Solitaire has always existed. This program references one version made in 1985.

Mysterious slow downs - No, pretty much everything was slow so didn't matter. Of course to get certain things running you'd have to mess around with the autoexec.bat and config.sys files to free up enough main memory, 640k my ass billy G!

Cost of hard drive space over time

[calvrak]

The Historical Notes about the Cost of Hard Drive Storage Space website has an incredible list of the cost per megabyte and then cost per gigabyte over the history of storage.

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".

Re:I still remember 8088 was hot

[MrChuck]

1. The 8088 sucked. Z80 with better carburators.
   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 //.) I was delighted to move from 68000->68040 without having to redesign software. Microcontroller makers passing them off as microprocessors.
2. 4.77MHz.
   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 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.

Not to date myself, but ...

[anorlunda]

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.

Not too mention

[geekoid]

that everybody know Australa is populate by thieves, and therefore stole the computer anyways. ;)