I bought my first computer, a 486 IBM clone with 8 megs of RAM and a 550 MB hard drive, in 1994. I think I paid over $2600 for the PC, CD-ROM, 14" monitor, and black and white inkjet printer.
My iTouch cost one-tenth of that, has 32 GB of memory, fits in my pocket, and can surf the internet at lightning-fast speed.
One thing's the same, though, from 1994 to the present: There's still a socialist in the White House hell-bent on hacking away at our freedoms and hobbling America on the world stage.
That is all.
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9 comments:
Youngster :-) Try an Apple II- 6502 microprocessor running at 1 MHz, 4 kB of RAM, an audio cassette , two floppies and that was it... I spent a TON on a 300 baud modem too... Of course that was 1977,,,
Heh. I was wondering who was going to one-up me on this one.
I thought it would be alan and his abacus first, though...
Ba-dum CHIH!
Shall I one-down you and remind you that in 1994 I was three years short of my first driver's license? ;-)
My wife and I went and saw "Hot Tub Time Machine". One of the characters is a typical anti-social geek with an iPhone. The characters belongings are found by folks in 1986 and trying to figure out what the modern iPhone and cell phones are.
During that scene with these 80's teenagers holding the iPhone I realized that had I brought an iPhone back to 1986, it would have been one of the most powerful computers on Earth at that time!
In 1986, the most powerful computer in the world was the Cray-2. It ran at 500Mhz, had 2GB of RAM and several GB of external storage and cost 25 million dollars.
The iPhone processor (620Mhz ARM) would be faster in clock speed, had much more available storage and with a high-resolution color display that wouldn't become commonplace in households until a decade later with the display alone costing more than the iPhone. The touch-screen, wireless networking and music/video capabilities simply did not exist then and would have been awe-inspiring.
And most people in the theater didn't even realize the significance of how far we've come in 20 years in terms of technology. I found that scene highly amusing.
Heh. I'm commenting from my driveway...
My first was a Tandy (the House Brand of Radio Shak) model 1000...
No hard drive, one floppy port, and t he entire OS (which had a calendar, word processor, and spreadsheet) was on said floppy. You had to swap disks every so often to save your work.
And yes, I can remember when a 40 mb harddrive first hit the market, and was $500. And folks were saying, at the time, "40 MEGS??? No-one will EVER need that much space! Its OVERKILL!*
And now in DESKTOPS we're talking terrabytes as standard equipment. All under 20 years time...
FYI...on a hunch, I just checked an old box stuffed in a closet...and I still have Windows 3.1 on 3.5" floppy disks. Six disk install, which puts it around 9mb for an OS.
Wonder if Microsoft still releases patches for it? ;-)
Wonder what I can get for a *vintage OS* on FleaBay?
TRS-80 (aks Trash-80) also Radio Shack. 56K on an altered audio cassette tape player serving as the drive.
It had the coolest chess program and if you got a "modem" you could play people in other countries!
My wife has some punch cards from her early days of "data processing" to remind me that I'm a newbie.
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