« Gerald Wallace Reups | Main | Waiting Times » Prices12 Jul 2007 04:51 pm Everyone's already linked to James Fallows' hilarious-in-retrospect 1982 article about how computers are awesome, but check the price -- he paid $4,000 for this machine. That's about $8,500 in contemporary money. For a computer with 48k of RAM. UPDATE: Similarly: "You have to understand, they told me, it can take five or ten minutes to load a long draft into the computer from tapes, whereas a disk drive (which would add a thousand dollars to the cost) could do the job in seconds." Comments (36)
More capable? Say what you will about the value of the features added to Word (or your favorite other word processor) over the years, it is clearly capable of more functions that any 1982 word processor. 
oh, you kids. when i was 14 and asked my father to buy me my first computer, i told him a VIC20 would be fine because there was no way i would need all of the memory and power that the C64 offered. i was so surprised when i unwrapped the serious and powerful C64.
When I started practicing law in the dark ages of 1985, we had dedicated word processors that were even more expensive than the primitive PC and could do less. The printer could print a page a minute. I distinctly remember writing court of appeals briefs and leaving for dinner while it took the hour or so for them to print. My wife bought a Leading Edge PC in 1986 that didn't have a hard drive, just floppy disks. It cost at least $2,500. I'm not usually enamored of the technology changes everything kind of arguments, but in terms of office productivity in a setting like a law firm, it is pretty amazing to see the impact of the PC. Oh, and get off my lawn!
I can recall, in my youth, in the dark ages of the early 70's, that a computer was something that occupied a building. Ah, long nights entering data by punching holes in cards . . .
he paid $4,000 for this machine. That's about $8,500 in contemporary money. For a computer with 48k of RAM. True, but Fallows's comparison to the 1910 auto industry wasn't too far off the mark. A Model T at that time cost about $850. That's about $18,500 in contemporary money. For a car with 20 hp and a top speed of 45 mph. My first portable computer, borrowed from my university in 1980 or so, weighed about 25 pounds, and I was glad to lug it the mile uphill through the snow to my house.
As I recall, it was about that time that I had a TRS-80 Color Computer with 4k of RAM. Mind you, it was expandable to 64k, which was obviously more memory than you could ever dream of using. Nothing will ever top tape drives for awesomeness, though, especially when you had to fiddle with the volume on your tape recorder because the program wouldn't load if the volume was a little too high or too low.
I had a TI-99/4a, we got the "expansion bay" which allowed you luxuries like a 5 1/4 drive and a 32k memory card about the size of an encyclopedia.
it is clearly capable of more functions that any 1982 word processor. Which is a very different metric, though TeX was pretty function-rich in 1982. My first computer? ZX Spectrum (48k) in 1983, £129 (£300 in today's money). And most early PCs and Macs were well beyond UK budgets. But it's only ten years ago that I bought my first PC for nearly £2,000: 32Mb RAM, 2Gb hard drive. And like rea, my first interaction with 'a computer' was the mainframe that handled customer accounts at my mother's office, complete with vt100 terminals and copies of ADVENT.
And I remember loading programs from cassette tape before we got that, worked exactly the same way pots line modems do, it's not as archaic as it sounds.
The first computer I ever saw was at an employee open-house at the Boeing Company. This was in Plant Two, a hanger-assembly building large enough to contain several 707s with room left over. Part of this room, about the size of a house, was filled with metal racks and electronic equipment, maybe 12-15 feet high- one of their computers. Then there were the 60s, when women with college degrees learned to punch data cards as part of the big push for the 747. Good times, good times. My favorite old-timey computer was a PC 'laptop' that had a steel case, weighed about 20 pounds, and could also serve as a totally awesome weapon. I was working the graveyard in a bad district when I had this, but never feared, as I could have beat off any number of muggers with this computer. Ha! Try that with your iPhone!
I believe it was 1983 when my elementary school got its first set of Apple IIe computers, which we all oohed and ahhed at. I believe the most sophisticated thing we ever achieved was writing simple BASIC programs that endlessly repeated phrases like "Jason is a dork." Eventually we played Oregon Trail on those computers, of course. I always seemed to die of pneumonia.
Brings back fond memories of ABDick Magna SL's ($14500 sticker price for two 10" floppies and of course no hard drive) and Zenith Data Systems Model Z89. Good times.... Provided you had A LOT OF TIME.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
A wave of depression sweeps over you.. Marvin enters the room.
get ax ...you are in a twisty maze of passageways, all alike
I believe it was 1983 when my elementary school got its first set of Apple IIe computers, which we all oohed and ahhed at. I found a discarded but working Apple IIe in a corridor at college about eight years ago, marked as the property of the nuclear physics laboratory.
I can recall, in my youth, in the dark ages of the early 70's, that a computer was something that occupied a building. Ah, long nights entering data by punching holes in cards . . . I learned BASIC in the mid-'70s; our 'computer' was a dumb terminal connected to a central processor that occupied a building somewhere, and we saved our programs on paper tape.
With apologies for posting what will probably look like line noise, or will screw up margins, here's what real gaming looks like:
a) some food
b) +1 ring mail [4] being worn
----------------------- ########## c) a +1,+2 mace in hand
| +############### d) a +1,+0 short bow
| | e) 28 +0,+0 arrows
---------------+------- f) a short bow
# i) a magnesium wand
# g) a magnesium wand
### ---------------- j) a potion of detect things
--------+---------- | l) a scroll of teleportation
| | #+ --press space to continue--
| | #| | #
| +#######| | ##
| | | +##############
--------+---------- ------------------- #
###### #
------+---------- ######
|...........@..!| #
|...........%...| ---------------- #
|...............| #+ | #######
|...............+#################| | #
|...............| | +###########
----------------- ----------------
Level: 3 Gold: 73 Hp: 36(36) Str: 14(16) Arm: 4 Exp: 4/78
In case James is reading this thread, I strongly suggest he download a free programme called Sequoia. It gives you a clear graphical depiction of what files are taking up how much space on your hard drive. It's probably the most useful free programme ever, after internet browsers and Winzip.
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." - Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." - Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of DEC
Summer of '70 - working in the Labor Dept., in Washington, DC, reading data off long print-outs for each program expenditure and using a pencil to fill in ovals on cards. The cards were sorted by machine (using rods? How'd they do that?) The purpose was to inform Congressmen how much money was spent and how many persons were trained in their district in job-retraining programs. Summer of '69 - in an intern program in Washington DC (first time I had sex - but with another intern, silly!)- they had a computerized simulation game for urban development. It didn't work (except that I think the group leader got laid - with an intern). Pecursor of Sim City, sort of. Late '60's - the guys in college into computer programming all had the coolest thing, a long print-out using numbers that represented a Playboy centerfold. (But not worth $29.95 a month)
Of course, the flipside is that in 1982 you could buy a home in Seattle for $40k that would sell for $400k today. Of course, today you can have a 'virtual life' with a laptop in a car you're living in. Pretty much the story of 'progress' in my lifetime.
If I can move us forward 10 years in our little stoll down memory lane - because of the way and speed that the technology has changed, people don't really get that one aspect of the government's antitrust suit against Microsoft. Back in the day, memory was scarce and expensive. When Microsoft decided to start mandatory bundling of formerly separate components into the operating system - sure you could go out and still buy Netscape for your web browser, but since you already had IE taking up a chunk of hard drive memory there was no incentive to. 20 megs used to be HUGE for a hard drive - nowadays that sounds so quaint.
It should be noted that todays $2000. desktop computers have more computing power then the largest and fastest $10,000,000 mainframe had in 1983.
And in 1/4 of the time we'll have people laughing a guys who paid $600 for a phone which couldn't even connect to teh internet at high speeds.
Pretty much the story of 'progress' in my lifetime. If you ignore the fact that, in general, housing has, in fact, gotten bigger and better, yes.
"More capable? Say what you will about the value of the features added to Word (or your favorite other word processor) over the years, it is clearly capable of more functions that any 1982 word processor." Are we certain this poster's name isn't Bill "Rahodeb" G? I remember those days. 1200 baud was state of the art. And there was information far more valuable posted in more or less public places than anywhere on the net in the wild west of the 1990s. Far more was gotten away on the frontier in 1849 than in 1870.
They ate indians back then because they could or because they were hungry. Whichever.
And in 1/4 of the time we'll have people laughing a guys who paid $600 for a phone which couldn't even connect to teh internet at high speeds. Why wait?
desktop computers have more computing power then the largest and fastest $10,000,000 mainframe had in 1983. yup. i just sold a used P4 3.2GHz and used this on the flyer: A mere $300 and this fine piece of computing machinery can be yours. Just think of it: 60 times the computing power of a Cray-1, for 1/100,000th the cost (in With this machine, you will be able to calculate tables of prime numbers and missile trajectories faster than anyone in 1977 could even dream of. It’s also great for playing all the hot new “video games” like Pong, Adventure and Nethack.
Had a TRS Model 100 with an expansion module that gave me a whopping 20K of free memory (the keyboard/computer itself had 16K, 12K of which was dedicated to BASIC). Also had a 5 inch floppy drive. I learned to program BASIC on that machine, but then my programs got so big I switched to Z80 assembly code. Built my own disk driver to drive the floppy too! Used a word processor called "Zorlof the Magnificent"! What a different world it was!
rea: I *still* play nethack. byte for byte it beats the pants off any game in the last 20 years.
I ignored the fact that some houses are larger today because I wasn't talking about houses that are larger today. I was talking about houses built from a Sears Roebuck kit in 1905 that originally cost about $900. One thing seems plain- all this computing power has done little for our reading comprehension, or ability to spell-check before posting.
Comments closed July 26, 2007. |
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Heads in the Sand
> but check the price -- he paid $4,000 for
> this machine. That's about $8,500 in
> contemporary money. For a computer with 48k of
> RAM.
Which for basic word processing was faster, more capable, and more reliable than his shiny new Vista system (see the next article on Fallows' blog for his discussion of Vista; the "faster and more capable" part comes from my personal memory).
Cranky
Posted by Cranky Observer | July 12, 2007 5:01 PM