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 (A complete waste of money and immediately out of date).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.

 

[Mel]

In the mid 1970s my secondary school introduced a brand new course “Computer Science”. Storage was on hard discs that it took 2 of us to carry and input was on punch card and paper tape.
Being logically minded I was quite good at it and seriously considered a career with IBM as a Systems Analyst. That was until the daft Careers Teacher ( who was actually the Games Teacher with a bad knee) persuaded me that the NHS was the way forward!
I would have been in on the ground floor; Me and Bill Gates would have been best mates by now and I would be well on my way to my umpteenth million. 😂
Mel

 

[otherclive]

Doing my degree in 68-71 there was the dilemma of whether to use slide rule and early calculators or the university main frame. With the latter you would have to produce punch cards and take them across Cardiff. They would then be run overnight as staff and post grads had daytime priority. When you then went to collect the output invariably one card would have had a logic error and the programme hadn’t compiled. So another 24 hours required. Even in mid 70s doing post grad it was a toss up whether a slide rule and programmable Casio calculator were quicker than an early desktop. I hated Algol and Basic.

 

[RogerL]

Doing my degree in 68-71 there was the dilemma of whether to use slide rule and early calculators or the university main frame. With the latter you would have to produce punch cards and take them across Cardiff. They would then be run overnight as staff and post grads had daytime priority. When you then went to collect the output invariably one card would have had a logic error and the programme hadn’t compiled. So another 24 hours required. Even in mid 70s doing post grad it was a toss up whether a slide rule and programmable Casio calculator were quicker than an early desktop. I hated Algol and Basic.

We only had a 24-48 hour turn around on coding sheets sent to the punch room - so we had a hand punch for corrections and frequently used to correct punched cards by reinserting the little chips that were punched out - we could use little "stickies" but some of the machines read electrically so the stickies were ineffective - and heaven help you if you dropped a deck of punched cards!

 

[JTQ]

Have to admit I was a late life scientific slide rule user, thought it was good for the grey cells doing the decimal place computation manually.

My first IMO "proper" electronic calculator acquisition was the TI-59 with programable magnetic slip cards, that expensive calculator I had to buy privately back in 1978. Still have it tucked away somewhere.

 

[Bluetonic]

I'm sat working on a clients data centre in a different part of the world. On my shelf above my monitors I have a 1979 Atari 400 that started my journey in IT when I was a kid. Money well spent by my parents, a three of us brothers work in IT. I also have it's replacement Atari 800XL and 1040 STE sat on the shelf