Awesome old ad, via Adam Thierer:
And of course my MacBook will look absurd some day.
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Times Change
18 May 2008 11:52 pm
Comments (36)
I agree with the general sentiment. But keep in mind that this ad is from almost 20 years ago. Of course your MacBook is going to be obsolete in the year 2027.
adjusted for inflation that computer would cost $14,717 today.
And the dollar was worth, what, twice what it is today? I mean, you could get a decent new car for nine grand back then.
Operate's SCO Xenix ... that's awesome.
But I think the much bigger story is at the larger end of the scale. $1M today will buy you hardware equal to something like 4 TB of RAM, 1 PB of hard drive, and capable of handling 50,000 simple page views per second (or 4 billion per day) ... the number of page views for very large websites like myspace/facebook/yahoo/google. Now, they're doing more complicated things, but the simple matter is that the hardware required to do very complicated things has gotten very very cheap.
To take this into policy for a second, how many page views do you think every government website gets combined? And do they have more or less dynamic content than, say, Yahoo? You could probably run it all for peanuts and drastically cut IT costs. Though, of course, I say this having never seen the breakdown of the govt's IT spending...
As another data point, I bought essentially the same computer (a PS/2 model 80 but *with* monitor and mouse) in the summer of 91 for my freshman year of college for about 3k.
My first-ever system (purchased mid 1990) was a Mac IIcx with 5MB(!) RAM and 40MB disk. Only 16mHz (till I added the 40mHz accelerator a few years later) but I think I spent about 5K including the 640x480 monitor, 8-bit video card and DataDesk keyboard.
Oops, it was a 55SX, which had an 80 MB harddrive. The model 80 was a different computer and still at least 5K in '91.
I bought Dell's top of the line computer for $3500 in 1995 and it was obsolete when it was delivered a week later. The top of the line by then was priced at $1800.
But, man, did Zork look good on that Tandy or what??
I can't remember what kind of system my uncle bought back in the day, but I remember the price: over $8,000. He had to refinance his house in order to buy it. One of the big reasons it was so expensive is that he insisted that it had to be stuffed to the gills with RAM. IIRC, over half the cost was for RAM alone.
The funny thing is, macs didn't use protected memory (A feature that the 386 has) until OSX came out.
You are in an open field west of a big white house with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
> hello
Nice weather we've been having lately.
> yes
I don't understand that.
> open mailbox
Opening the mailbox reveals: A leaflet.
> read leaflet
Taken. 'Buy a copy of Heads in the Sand! "A very serious, thoughtful argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care." — Ezra Klein, staff writer at TAP'
> fuck
You ought to be ashamed of yourself.
Ah, yes. That's Aldus PageMaker 3 I believe, onscreen (way before Adobe bought them out). And hey, a 386 at 20 Mhz, with 2 megabytes of RAM? No one needs that kind of power!
The first Macs were about $2500 on launch in 1984, and incredibly expensive in the UK. I remember someone with a Commodore PET a few years earlier, and that was exotic and scarily new.
Though, of course, I say this having never seen the breakdown of the govt's IT spending...
My guess is that it'll be massively weighted towards internal spending, not least because they'll generally be MS shops with creaky Exchange servers, hit-and-miss backup and people sending the same attachment as a forward to 27 colleagues.
Ah. Those were the days. My family's first computer was an Apple IIe. I remember games like Wizardry, Ultima and Sargon.
The thing about Wang Labs is that the guy pronounces his own name wrong (same problem Terry Schiavo's husband has). That name is pronounced like "Wong," as the Yankees' pitcher Chien-Ming Wang's family name is correctly pronounced. The name "Wang" pronounced in that way, is funny because no such name exists.
Matt, you are making quite an assumption about the Mac Book I think. The manufacture and operation of computers is very energy-intensive, and we really are reaching the end of Moore's Law.
Of course things will continue to change, but I anticipate the change being of a different kind, and less of the break-neck variety. What we might hope to see is vastly more energy-efficient designs. I certainly hope so.
2MB RAM was unthinkable in my day. My (OK, my brother's) BBC Micro had a massive 32K. and that was the high end version. Even my next computer (Atari STE) had only 1MB, and the external hard drive I eventually got (120MB, I think) was bigger than the computer itself.
The Apple IIe was awesome because you could actually type in lower case. It had a "caps lock" function.
The best part, to me, is that you can't even tell how big the hard drive is in that thing. it's maybe 50MB tops?
Lowercase was indeed a great step forward in the Apple IIe, which our family understood well, since we were the proud owners of an Apple II+.
I owned a TRS-80 Model 1. In fact, I was working for a service bureau in Rapid City, South Dakota, when the TRS-80 first came out and we had one shipped up to us for evaluation.
The amusing thing about that was the service bureau was running a machine from the 1960's which had - wait for it - 40K of "core" memory - real magnetic cores. It was 30,000 pounds of hardware, which needed reinforced floors. It had a dozen nine-track tape drives, and a chain printer. You entered programs using front panel switches. Weirdly, the internal data representation was...English. We had a disk drive, but it was non-functional. The drive disk was something like six feet across, required a 30HP motor to be rotated and contained about 10MB IIRC. Insane piece of junk.
A year or so before the TRS-80 came out, when I was in college (the first time) at Lane Community College, in Eugene, Oregon, about the third computer store in the country opened up there, called "The Real Oregon Computer Store". I was in the door the day before it opened. I messed around with Altairs and Processor Tech and Ohio Scientific and the like there and later in Denver at various computer stores. I remember guys entering their programs using front panel switches and if they were lucky, a Teletype.
The TRS-80 machine was way more powerful than that huge mainframe. So were the IBM System/32's and System/34's I worked on over the next four years, and then the IBM PC's I worked on at Bank of America were more powerful than them.
I played my first computer game at that store, that stupid one with the little ASCII stick airplanes flying over that you had to shoot with little ASCII stick cannons. I wasted two hours on that game and swore never to play computer games again.
I held to that until I owned an Atari 520ST, the first decent graphics machine you could buy for under $1,000 on which I played an Asteroids game and Neuromancer. Then I swore off again until I played "Hit Man" a couple years ago on my current PC. Now I've sworn off again after that incredibly time wasting experience.
But no doubt once I've gotten a new machine this year with sufficient power, I'll probably end up playing "Hit Man" again or some military game where I can play at being a terrorist.
My current machine is about five years old. An Athlon CPU at 1.67GHz (Intel 2GHz Pentium IV equivalent), 1GB RAM, about 260GB of hard drive space soon to be upgraded with another 500GB drive. An old Viewsonic 6 monitor. Dual-booting openSUSE Linux and Windows XP. Worked pretty good up until now, but no good for either running virtual OS's or high-def video. So it's time to get a new one and turn this one into my backup.
Next machine is likely to be an AMD 64 dual-core with 2-4GB of RAM, and 3/4 of a terabyte of disk, running openSUSE Linux with Windows XP and 2003 server running as virtual machines. Probably cost me about $600-700. It will hold me for another three years or more, probably.
SCO Xenix - that's back in the day when SCO stood for "Santa Cruz Organization", not the thieves and liars it stands for today. The earliest microprocessor-based UNIX, IIRC. Wikipedia just reminded me that it was actually a Microsoft product that was ported by SCO and sold via OEMs, not directly by Microsoft, who didn't dare risk having UNIX compared with DOS.
Wow. That was one seriously over priced machine. I bought a Dell in January 1989 with a 386-20 and 2M ram similar to this. I included a Cyrix 387 math coprocessor and a 15" Viewsonic monitor, a 12" digitizing tablet(think mouse) and a dot matrix printer for about $5400. Add in a 36" pen plotter and the hardware was just over $10,000. The 80386-25 was the fastest processor available at the time, and yes, the math coprocessor was separate.
and to think my first major consulting project was using a Commodore 64 with CPM (far better than DOS -- I wrote FORTH (anyone remember that language?) code to control a machine and had GOBS of memory -- a full 64kb.
joejoejoe wins the thread.
Oh, PageMaker. Sometimes I still miss you.
Great Freezepop song: "Do You Like My Wang(TM)?"
That's ComputerWang!
Back in 1989 I was programming on Lisp machines, which cost in the neighborhood of $50K. To do what I can now do on a laptop costing maybe $1K. (The productivity and ergonomics of those old machines were amazing, though, and still would be today.)
For perspective, that thing has less computing power than a $49 iPod Shuffle, which despite its simplicity has an ARM-based RISC CPU.
Jesus, I'm old.
Jesus, I'm old.
Sharon, that's my line.
"The best part, to me, is that you can't even tell how big the hard drive is in that thing. it's maybe 50MB tops?"
Probably 20MB. This is Radio Shack we're talking about.
When I started college in 89 I got an SE/30, 16MHz 68030 with a 40 MB hard drive, which cost $3499 (edu discount). Other people in my class bought an SE with a 20MB drive.
The Mac Plus that I bought in September 1988 (with daisy wheel printer and whopping 20MB external hard drive) cost more than two years' in-state tuition and fees at University of California law schools ($1500/yr at the time). Times have changed.
Radio Shack press release for this machine here:
ftp://ftp.oldskool.org/pub/tvdog/tandy1000/documents/5000.txt
Says 84MB hard drive - that's MB, not GB!
However, that press release says retail price is around $5K.
"However, that press release says retail price is around $5K."
That's $5k *without a hard drive*.
It quotes $6499 with a 40MB hard drive, and $6999 for the 84MB drive.
I don't know how they get to the $8499 in the ad shown above. Maybe the press release has typos, so the $6499 40MB config should be the $8499 in the ad above?
Those prices are just wacky, though. Even for 1988.
No wonder Steve Jobs' NeXT Cube cost $10,000 when it first came out in 89.
Comments closed June 01, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
We had one TRS-80 with a cassette tape drive in my elementary school. If only I'd been as interested in the actual field of computing instead of playing the data tapes and debating whether they sounded more like ghosts or robots I'd be a gazillionaire today.
And to that kid in my class whose father worked at WANG...it's still funny! WANG!
Posted by joejoejoe | May 19, 2008 12:04 AM