A day that got away from me, doing some ham-related stuff. So, as usual, some things that I thought were worth sharing.
First, for my fellow old timers that had computers in the '70s and '80s, a
friend I've known since the early '90s dropped me an email with this picture and
a link to Quora
where it was posted.
His remark was something like "This is how much good computers used to cost." Back around '89, I had a computer with an 80386 processor like that one, the 80387 math coprocessor, and VGA, I think it had a 30 MB hard drive, and I just don't remember it all well enough to do more comparisons to this one. Mine cost about $600 IIRC.
But when I see a price like that from 1989 my instinct is to see what that would cost in today's inflated currency, so off to "USinflationcalculator.com." The phrase "pucker factor" comes to mind.
And finally one that's among the most reasonable comments I've seen on
Artificial Intelligence. I don't remember where I got it but it didn't look
like this. It was tilted so that woman's picture, which looks like it was
cropped at an angle was really the bottom edge. I edited it to make it look
more normal.
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Yep, things are upside-down nowadays, and the AI scene is something else.
ReplyDeleteThe Dell Laptop I'm typing on has a 256Mb SSD, an i5 running at 2.30 GHz, 8GB of memory, and 64-bit Win10. It can easily run circles around that 1998 computer.
Technology marches on.
And, there IS a lot of automation in household appliances nowadays, but if we humans are smart we will ignore them. I don't trust IoT nor what it can control.
In '89 I was running a Commodore 64. Worked well enough for word processing and spreadsheet requirements. Matched it with a PK-232 and TS-520S for RTTY out of Africa. Those were the days...
ReplyDeleteI had pretty much shelved my C64 by about '86. I built an XT clone and used that for a couple of years. I'm pretty sure I had the 386 I mentioned by '89 but it might have been a little later. These things blur over time.
DeleteNatzsofast.
ReplyDeleteWhen desktop calculators came out, they were going for north of $100 for a 10-digit machine.
A year later, 12-digit calculators were going for $10.
That Tandy trashpile was likely overtaken by Moore's Law in the same time span, and was worth 1¢ on the dollar for what was paid for it a year later.
That's really the point of that whole part of the post: how much the continuous drive from Moore's law has cut prices. As chip density has gone up, the drop in prices is practically inconceivable. The improvements in the price of other things are nothing in comparison.
DeleteA year ago, I bought a computer that would run practically infinite rings around that computer for a teeny tiny fraction of the price. The inflation calculator doesn't mean that kind of computer costs that today, that's an attempt to put that price into today's money to give people an idea of how big a purchase that would have been.
Just to put things in a perspective I can relate to ... "In 1989, a new Jeep, specifically a Jeep Wrangler, would have cost around $11,869 for the base model price."
ReplyDeleteIn 1989 I was running a Mac and a generic-box-self-assembled PC clone. The only thing either was really useful for was writing.
ReplyDeleteI remember the first time I saw a home computer. It was TSR1. I was enchanted.
ReplyDeleteThe AI quote has been making the rounds even very recently; fascinatingly enough AI cannot in and of itself do that for you (that is robotics, I suspect).
Remember the TRS-80? Also known as the "Trash 80".
DeleteI have a TRS 80 Model I Level 2 clone, LNW 80, that I built back in the mid 1980s from a board. LNW's first product was an expansion board for the TRS 80; they added the "motherboard" for the computer to make a full deal. It uses RS eproms for the firmware. I need to get it out and fire it up just for the heck of it.
DeleteSorry! I gotta quibble.
ReplyDeleteI ran the calculator for $0.05 which is what it used to cost me in 1950 for a regular-sized Milky Way candy bar.
The inflation calculator says I can get one now for $0.65; it's more like $1.25 when you can find something similar
Most of the inflation calculators you find have a disclaimer somewhere that there's more than one way to define it and they have such and such backing. Blah, blah, blah.
DeleteBased on what I recall about computer prices around the time of that ad, they couldn't have sold more than a couple of them.
Check the size and material content of said candy bar. Less sugar-cane sugar, more corn sugar. Smaller size, too. Packaging and production ability has rapidly changed, too, making the per-item cost much less per-item now than in the 50's or 60's.
DeleteIn 1987 I bought an Atari 520ST 16/32 bit computer. I paid the salesman handsomely to upgrade the memory to 1 MB (an add-on PC board wired into the bus, no sockets then). My main goal was to get a good FORTRAN compiler, and as I had managed to get a copy of the NEC2 source code, I compiled it for the 520ST. I sent out many copies of that, and the source code, but only to those who could send me a copy of their ID showing US citizenship. It was "FOUO" at the time - not classified but restricted distribution. Having run it and similar codes on a VAX/VMS mini, I was blown away by the performance of the Atari.
ReplyDeleteYou know the price for computers is included in the inflation index, unlike the price on houses. Oh, and the govt includes an estimated power factor as well so a 64 bit processor running at 4 GHz is 250 times more powerful than a 32 bit processor running at 25 MHz, so should cost 250 times as much, and since it costs less they factor all that into the official inflation rating. So $8500 times 250 is $2,125,000 for a relative cost of that old computer compared to today's price of ~$800 (Dell XPS desktop), all included into the govt's official inflation index.
ReplyDeleteFunny how they include computer prices that drop at a unique rate, but they don't include food and energy because "they're too volatile."
DeleteIn 1986 me and a friend sold 386 clones for $1900 out of ad in a computer magazine for 8 months. The were 2 M ram, 256k video card, network/modem, and 3.5" floppy. I don't remember the size of the HDD but it was small and had DOS 3. It was computer only, the monitor, mouse, and keyboard were not included. We built them in my living room after we got off work. We would sell 6 to 10 of these a week. I made enough to pay cash for an 86 Buick Skylark that had all the bells and whistles, also a tricked out 386 for both me and my buddy. Upgrading the OS to DOS 4 taught me a big lesson.
ReplyDeleteWhat was the lesson?
DeleteI can't speak for Tsquared, but the lesson I got from DOS 4 was to never buy a Microsoft product at a version that ends with zero.
DeleteDon't be an early adopter. Let it work some bugs out before you upgrade.
DeleteNot that laundry and dishes take longer than 20 minutes.
ReplyDeleteOh, God. PageMaker. All I can really say is... it worked, barely. Still better than banging out a paper on a manual typewriter.
ReplyDeletePeople forget how expensive tech used to be. In the middle 1980s I worked for a mainframe manufacturer, in the division making disk storage. The disk drives were larger than my refrigerator, cost in the low-middle 6 figures and held 9 gigabytes.
ReplyDeleteMicro center will sell you a 2 Terabyte USB drive for 80 bucks.
The $8400 computer you highlight would do wonderful (average?) word processing, but it wouldn't play anything like the massive graphic games we have today.
The technology we are surround with, carry around in our pockets and purses, would have been considered miraculous not that long ago. And what do we do with it? TikTok videos.