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."

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

[popeyethesailor]

The Parent comment alone shows how much undervalued the contributions of so many brilliant free software volunteers.

Is this what Software freedom is all about? $0 ?

Re:newsflash

[JWSmythe]

The way I see it, the initial cost is $0. If you find it worth while, it's worth paying a few bucks for. That reminds me, it's about time to pay my tribute to a few of the groups I use their stuff frequently. Time to buy a round of CD's and T-shirts to give away to friends. :)

My Slackware hat is starting to look kind of ratty, I guess I should get one for myself too.

If I ever bump into Linus in real life, I'm going to take him out drinking. :)

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).

Re:newsflash

[ron_ivi]

That sounded too harsh.... I bought support from Linux vendors before - because that is an easy-to-identify value-add that saves time==money.

And agreed, I'd buy Linus a drink - but more because I'd be interested to hear his thoughts than for creating a nice alternative to BSD.

I admit that the Linux kernel hackers are making significant advances beyond what OS's used to be. But these technologies - like all technologies - really are maturing and becoming more and more commodity-like as time moves forwa

Re:newsflash

[geekoid]

thats funny, I'd like to buy Linus a drink as well. Mostly becasue I'd like to swap a lot of NON computer stories. He seems like an interesting fellow.

I think stories about our kids would be far more interesting then talking to him about something he's already told 100000 people.

Australian Dollar?

[dnahelix]

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

Re:Australian Dollar?

[conufsed]

Wildly inaccurate probably, but it has varied between 50-80cents over the last ten years, I know at some stage (in the 70s?) the aussie dollar was stronger for a while, which caught out a number of aussies who taken US$ loans

Re:Australian Dollar?

[chimpo13]

More importantly, what's the Aussie dollar going to be like in the next 2 months?

I made some payments for the bike I'm riding round the world a couple years ago when the OZ dollar was worth 52 cents American. Now it's up to 78 cents and I'm screwed. I still owe money on the bike. It would've been cheaper for me to pay the credit card interest (it's been bouncing between 0% and 3.9%).

I tried to pay but I think the guy who's building the bike thought he was doing me a favor by not getting more money. Argh

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?

[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?

[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!

Why studying Economics is a good thing

[palfreman]

Excellent little bit of economics there incast. Short, accurate & to the point. I'd have liked to have writted that :)

Re:Australian Dollar?

[shellbeach]

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.

Hmmm ... I think the point was that $6000 for an 8.6Mb hard drive was funny in itself, irrespective of inflation, cost of living, or whatever other benchmark you care to think up.

(Consider - adjusting as you propose for inflation will only *increase* the equivalent price above $6000. I'd imagine that the conversi

Not too mention

[geekoid]

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

Re:Australian Dollar?

[dcstimm]

Does that mean that the US economy is better than Australis? We are kicking their ass! :-)

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?

[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 [ela.co.nz]

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Australian Dollar?

[1u3hr]

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

Prior to the stock market crash of October 1987, it was about US$1.20. I was travelling at the time and found that my traveller's cheques, in AUD, were suddenly worth about half in local currency than the day before. That hurt.

A good site for tracking the AUD is here [ino.com], though it only goes back about two years.

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.

Re:reasonable

[dnahelix]

I think the point is to study the specific pattern of the cost (value) reductions, which is an obvious trend, but can't be used to predict prices if not studied.

I still remember 8088 was hot

[xiando]

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.

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.

Re:I still remember 8088 was hot

[travail_jgd]

"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."

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 .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.)

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.

RE: bad/bloated software

[King_TJ]

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!

Re:The solution is simple...

[mrjb]

I actually tried something similar. The mother of a friend had bought an old second hand machine that wouldnt accept an IDE CD-ROM drive yet. So I took out the hard drive and installed windows 3.1 on my own machine to put back the drive later. Sure enough, win 3.1 absolutely *flies* on a 233 MHz pentium.

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 [pbs.org] 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 [kurzweiltech.com] 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 [thinkgeek.com] 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);
};

Same script, 10 years earlier...

[geekoid]

#!/bin/pseudoperl
#
# Replacement for average user
# v.1b

use Game;

while (1){
while ( period = "waking hours" && tsr = "working" ){
$input = game;

);
sleep (5 hrs);
};

Re:Look at more recent stuff

[foobsr]

computers surpassed the average users mental capabilities in about 1998. :)

Hmm, not because computers became more complicated or major paradigms shifted. Just an access issue. Similar story may be written with respect to the automobile.

CC.

who are you?

[circletimessquare]

his hollywood agent?

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.

Re:/.'ed

[Agg]

No, it's a P4 3GHz doing the webserving with a dual AthlonMP 2800+ doing the database back-end. S'funny, the servers are both coping fine, so I'm wondering if we're being capped on a router somewhere..

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

[bobhagopian]

For the same reason that a gallon of gasoline costs $1.49 and nine tenths. If they were to sell the hard drive for $6000, I'm sure a lot of people would think "Hmm, $6000 is a lot of money" even though it's only a dollar more. Something about that first digit tends to affect consumer decisions.

Re:How

[darkewolf]

Marketing theory (based on something I read a number of years ago) is that prices that contain many 9s in them sells better.

A product for $14.99 will sell better than one for $14.95 if similiar products.

For some reason 9s sell.

Although given that australia no longer has 1c or 2c coins, most sub-dollar values are now in 5c increments.

Re:How

[really?]

Someone better tell this to the Japanese. Here all prices seem to end in "8", or more precisely "98"

Re:How

[darkewolf]

Could be a cultural thing as well. I really should find the book the paper / article / study was published in again. Oh well :)

Re:How

[Tim C]

The theory I heard was that it was to force the cashier to open the till (to get the customer's change), thus making it harder for them to simply pocket the money as the customer turned away.

I also imagine that there's an element of truth to the marketing angle, of 49.99 being advertised as "under 50!" and seeming cheaper subconsciously.

Re:How

[tarunthegreat2]

I took a few marketing classes in college, and the "Sounds cheaper" explanation was the reasoning they gave for the .99 pricing. They said that when people recall 5999, they say 5000+ dollars instead. But what's the point really - when you add on taxes, it's no longer 9.99 anyway...

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.

Re:How

[Yokaze]

> here in Canada at least

In other countries, there are no such tax brackets for prices. Still, there are such Price-1 values.

I also heard the story about "sounds less expensive". IRC, at one point in time, a research showed that people subcounsciously choose that way. But, I also heard that people have already adapted to it and nowadays are usually rounding up, so it is totally useless.

Re:How

[eingram]

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

Woo! Sign me up.

That's like a new car...

[Agent Green]

$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.

Considering...

[ashitaka]

That would have been a full-height 5.25" hard drive I would imagine it would strike you very hard.

July 1983 : Oracle

[sloth jr]

In Byte Magazine, July 1983, Oracle was mentioned in the updated products section (I think it was version 2 or 3), with multi-user licenses priced between $600 - $2000.

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.

Re:How silly

[PsychoFurryEwok]

Indeed, this one company we were doing work for had a Petabyte of storage at this one data center. For cheap too...ridiculously awesome how things have come down.

Re:How silly

[JWSmythe]

Funny, I was just working on one of our multi-terabyte multi-cpu multi-ghz machines today. My first "modern" machine was a 486/33 with a 20Mb hard drive.

This one isn't our fastest, it just has the largest storage. I'm sure in 10 years, it'll be nothing that I'd even want to work with, because it'll be so slow.

$ uname -a
Linux server 2.6.7 #1 SMP Tue Jun 29 03:51:47 EDT 2004 i686 unknown unknown GNU/Linux

$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/md0 19G 2.7G 15G 16% /
/dev/sda

Re:How silly

[Diag]

That's a lot of empty disk.

The storage administrator I once was is screaming "Give it back! Wasting money!"

Re:How silly

[JWSmythe]

I'll mention it to my bosses. :)

We have a 6u Dell Quad Xeon 500 box that we're retiring in the next few weeks, that we're trying to figure out what to do with. I suggested it would make a very nice boat anchor. Aparently we're still paying the financing to Dell on it. Maybe they'll take it back. :)

You wouldn't really want it as a workstation, it sounds like a freakin' turboprop airplane taking off when it's running.

Re:How silly

[mandalayx]

Actually I think the most impressive leaps have already been taken in a previous age.

check out this graph of the population of the world [guibord.com]. the sudden explosion during the Industrial Revolution is staggering, dwarfing even the exponential increases in computer power.

graph 2 [prb.org]
graph 3 [ucsd.edu]

This makes profit margins great...

[TheOtherAgentM]

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.

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.

Hard Drives-The chronicles of "Dick".

[Anonymous Coward]

"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?"

Re:Hard Drives

[Epistax]

That's a very interesting thing to note. This would have almost happened with me but I bought an SATA drive for speed, not storage. As far as I'm concerned *gasp* 80 gb is currently enough for me. That's enough for several games and every application I own to be installed at the same time with lots of media on the side. If I need more space, sure I might have to sacrifice (swap out a game, some media) but it's really not an issue with CDRWs anyway-- I'm not losing anything.

That being said I'll buy lar

Ahh.. the "good ole days".

[IOOOOOI]

My first hard drive, 325MB, cost $1 per MB. Then I bought an expanded (or was it extended?) memory board and 512K of RAM for $450.

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.

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

[JWSmythe]

Ahhh, the days of the text based video games.. I miss "Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy"

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:not *that* amazing

[robin]

If you read the source to that page you can see the URL for the Z5 file, which you can then download [douglasadams.com], and play with the interpreter of your choice. See The Interactive Fiction Archive [ifarchive.org] for one of those. If you enjoyed the HHGTTG you may also be interested in the CD "The Masterpieces of Infocom" -- I got mine from lacegem [lacegem.com] I think. There's loads of good stuff in ifarchive as well.

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 [arizona.edu] 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!

Re:not *that* amazing

[G-funk]

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.

Hehehe... Youngsters. I believe the grandparent poster was lamenting the times before the days of irqs and hercules adapters and PC compatibles. I read his post and missed my apple //c :)

Re:not *that* amazing

[zakezuke]

Later on sound cards (like the first sound blaster) would randomly crash your system if things weren't setup just right (IRQs, memory addresses).

Tell me about it.

2nd printer port, defult address IRQ 5
sound card, prefered address IRQ 5
SCSI card, default address IRQ 5
Network adapter, default address IRQ 5
QIC02 adapter, Default address IRQ 5

8 slots, everything set to IRQ 5. Common problem. Who needs to use their modem, tapedrive, scsi card, etc...etc.. at the same time anyway.

Com1/Com2 default IRQ4/3 re

It's a cry for attention!

[YeeHaW_Jelte]

... no mysterious slow-down in your OS over a period of months (KDE, why do you do that????).... Your computer is begging you to dump KDE and install WindowMaker, you insensitive clod!

Re:not *that* amazing

[dcw3]

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????).

Damn you wipper-snappers (in my 40's), I wax nostalgic for the days when if you had a disk you were probably rich, cuz they were only available on mini, midi, or main-frames.

Cost of hard drive space over time

[calvrak]

The Historical Notes about the Cost of Hard Drive Storage Space [littletechshoppe.com] 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".

Here's their first mistake...

[TiMac]

Too many sites do this, and then face the fury of /.

Unfortunately some of the images are quite large (none more than 250KB)

Re:Here's their first mistake...

[Agg]

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.

Moore money.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Time Warp Computer Pricing Revealed"

And yet the cost of computer magazines have gone up. $12 for a Linux magazine with a CD.

Radio Shack Model 16

[Stephen Samuel]

Ran Microsoft Xenix (which was later sold to (old) SCO).

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.

Amdahl V6

[Stephen Samuel]

This box had 24Meg of RAM and ran at roughly 1 MIPS in 1979. I Can't remember just how much hard disk space it had (I think it was well over 200Megabytes), but Don't believe it was included in the price tag.

It could handle up to about 300 simultaneous users before it started to slow down real noticably, and it cost about $6Million Dollars.

Re:Radio Shack Model 16

[JWSmythe]

The first computer I used was a TRS 80 Model III. It was at my school. There were no floppy drives, just a single cassette deck, but we didn't have anything to actually put in there. :) I think the most productive thing it ever ran were the basic programs I'd type in from a learning basic book.

Wheeeee, I can make text scroll on the screen. :)

Oh, the good ol' days. Now if I were to write the same thing, it'd scroll by faster than you could see.

[insert obligatory "walking to school in the sn

Location of Manufacture

[Tlosk]

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?

Orders of magnitude

[wolfdvh]

We should probably talk in terms of how many orders of magnitude of change we have seen. My first 'real' PC came with a 4 mhz z-80 and had a whopping 64K of memory. It had 2 floppy drives, One for the OS and program I was running, Wordstar, dBase II, etc. and one for the data. Came with everything you would expect in a business computer but a printer for about $1700 US. At 23 pounds, with a handle, it was considered a portable.

I remember the first time I saw super good deal on a HD. 10 Meg for only $1

Cool, not scary -- Hitachi 9980 in my future!

[ediron2]

This isn't scary, it's the coolest thing imaginable.

I've spent a chunk of time lately playing with a Sun/Hitachi 9980 [hds.com]. Imagine a fiber channel array of hard drives the size of a nice, hefty subzero 2-door refrigerator (2m x 2m x 1m, roughly, for 1 control module and 1 array module).

It hooks up to a dozen computers, has room for over 100TB of drivespace (raid-5), has an configuration console beyond the OS that allows some slick on-the-fly tricks, is compatible with virtually ANY OS, lets you slice the a

My benchmark has moved was $5,000

[oo_waratah]

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.

I've got some late 70s mags at home, somewhere

[Kris_J]

Shame I didn't know about the original request for scans. I've got a substantial magazine collection going back to at least the late 70s. The trick is finding them. I started off storing them chronilogically, but I got a huge heap from someone else all at once and they haven't been in an order since. Still, I bet I could dig up some seriously insane prices.

Technology is cheap now, but...

[huchida]

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.

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.

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Has computer price really dropped?

[pe1chl]

Sure when you compare byte-for-byte, the price has dropped dramatically over 20 years.
But when you compare price of a typical user's system, is the difference really that much?

Today a typical office desktop machine would be around 1000 euro (or US$). That is also what I paid for my first computer in 1980. Of course it had 16K instead of 512M of RAM, a tape recorder instead of a 120GB harddisk drive, a 2 MHz Z-80 processor instead of a 3 GHz Pentium 4, but the users of that time bought it for the same pur

Not so

[geekoid]

factor in inflation, and the fact that most everything else has gone up in price for the equivilent item.

Yes, it has...

[imsabbel]

Did you 1000 computer from 1980 have a printer? A monitor? Disk drives?
I think not. With this stuff, even 1986 a cpc6128 cost 2000+.

1980 a simple disk drive cost more then a whole pc now. A 9.6k modem was more expensive than a tft monitor. A 4MB EISA Gfx card 1990 was more expensive than a dual cpu DELL server today.

and thats not even considering inflation.

Tandy

[Trillan]

I remember seeing one of Tandy's first PC-compatibles for $5100 CDN. I don't remember if that included a monitor -- I think it included a CGA one. That must have been a 386 at most.

Inflation people, inflation.

[geekoid]

A lot of people are saying that they pay the same amout for a computer today, as they did 10 or 20 years ago. But if you factor in inflation, you are paying less.
Plus, most things go up in price for the equivilent product.

Upgrading slowly & over vast distances

[Bushcat]

Early in the 80's, I bought one of the first BBC Micros (serial # 13?) for my brother. It maxed out my credit card and I upgraded it from 8kB to 16kB (or maybe 16kB to 32kB) by ordering one chip a week from the US.

In 1988 I upgrade the company's 286 desktop from, I think, 5 MB to 30 MB. It was much cheaper to fly from Japan to Singapore, buy a drive and fly back, than to purchase locally.

Not long after, I built the company's first drive rack out of unexpectedly big, heavy full-height 5" drives, learning

Not surprising at all

[iamdrscience]

Is anyone surpised that hardware gets cheaper over time? This has been going on as long as people have been selling computer equipment. I was looking through a filing cabinet the other day and found the original invoices for my first computer (Apple IIe) and the hard drive for my first PC (540MB, at the time it was huuuuge amount of storage). Their respective prices IIRC were about $3,000 and $500.

With $3,000 I could buy at least 4 of my current systems, each of which would be well over 1,000 times faster.

Re:Not surprising at all

[mc6809e]

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.

ZX Spectrum/Timex upgrade

[16K Ram Pack]

In 1983, I bought a ZX Spectrum with 16k of memory and later upgraded to 32K. The 32K upgrade chips cost me about 25UKP (about $40).

On that price basis, I worked out that 1GB of memory would have cost me over 1 million dollars at the time.

1984 and 1987

[dcw3]

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.

Computer Pricing?

[Mordaximus]

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 ;)

What's scary is...

[michaelmalak]

This snapshot of historical pricing is fascinating and, quite frankly, a little scary. How does $5999 for an 8.6MB hard drive strike you?

No, what's scary (to me) is that some slashdot readers don't remember this first-hand.

"386-20MHz: Fast. Expensive. And worth it!"

[Slashdolt]

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". ;-)

Re:I can buy what now?!

[JWSmythe]

Any 386 or better, my son.. :)

Re:people expect too much for nothing

[Ohreally_factor]

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 su