Inflation

[Sam Vimes]

Back in about 1992 I got my first PC. We'd had computers on the home prior to this but this was the first PC. It had a 40Mbyte hard drive and 1Mbyte of Dram.

On this I used to surf the net, such as it was; check email; do word processing and spreadsheets and play a few games.

These days to do just the same I need at least a 100Gbyte hard drive and 4Gbytes of Dram.

Admittedly I can probably do more than I use to if I wanted but there seems no way to get rid of the unnecessary functions. I do trim out as much as possible but it makes little difference.

 

[otherclive]

I bet you didn’t have your X thousands of photos and the editing suite to play with. So could we be accused of sponsoring an element of inflation.

 

[Jcloughie]

In 1984/5 I was given £20,000 (£82,000 plus today), to buy whatever I fancied. Strange, as my only experience was a Spectrum ZX81. But my employer (the government) took a chance on me.

From memory, I bought about 8 Apricot PC’s 2 Sharp PC’s with 20 inch colour screens, a network of 5 Philips linked to a 5gb HD (our only HD). 2 macintosh. And about 4 Amstrads.

A goofball typewriter with a 1 line memory. (A complete waste of money and immediately out of date).

No internet.

Operating systems, MSDOS CPM CPM86 Apple DOS and original Windows.

A few printers and a plotter.

Software, Wordstar, Datastar and Calcstar. CAD for the Sharps.

The learning curve was immense. But we ran a highly successful training centre, one of the first in the Country.

John

 

[otherclive]

Our kids had the ZX81 my first encounter with a desk top PC was using IBM XTs when in Canada in 1985. They were used for condition monitoring trials on ships.

 

[RogerL]

Back in 1966 I joined Rolls-Royce as an apprentice, studying computing - at the time we had the largest computer installation in Europe - our largest computer, an IBM S/360, had just 1 Mb of memory with data being processed from reel-to-reel tape.

One of the computers we had at college, now Wolverhampton University, was a valve machine previously install at Harwell Atomic Research with just 90 memory positions - but being valves their contents could be read directly!

 

[Sam Vimes]

I bet you didn’t have your X thousands of photos and the editing suite to play with. So could we be accused of sponsoring an element of inflation.

It's true but as I mentioned even if I wanted to do just the same as I did in the 90s I'd still need a machine that's 1000s of times larger and fastest.

Interestingly though the relative cost of the machines...90s to today....show todays machines are cheaper.

 

[JTQ]

Thankfully the real price of computing technology has gone very much in the reverse direction to the complexity.
I can't remember what I paid for a Sinclair "Cambridge" calculator, it was a lot to me at the time and I even had to assemble it myself!

 

[toad a caravan]

Back in the early 90's I noticed that every six months or so the performance/capacity of components almost doubled,hard drives CPU,s,video and sound card..the one thing that stayed faithful to the cause was "There has been a fatal error" oh no!!😟

 

[RogerL]

Back in the early 90's I noticed that every six months or so the performance/capacity of components almost doubled,hard drives CPU,s,video and sound card..the one thing that stayed faithful to the cause was "There has been a fatal error" oh no!!😟

That was happening through the '60/70/80s as well.