Tuesday, January 3, 2017

Got Nuttin' Today....

Just been tinkering on yet another ( ! ) laptop for my friend's animal rescue place.

This one had a hard-disk that was on it's way out, so I ran to Best Buy yesterday to grab a new drive, and now it's finishing up all the Windoze Updates.

I bought a 500 GB Seagate drive for FIFTY BUCKS....think about that a second.

The first brand-new hard drive I ever bought was in December of 1996. Fry's Electronics was having an after Christmas sale, and I bought a Western Digital 1.6 GB drive for TWO HUNDRED BUCKS.

And that was a very good price at the time.

So, what this means is that the drive I bought has over two-hundred and fifty times the capacity for one-quarter of the price.

In other words, the "raw" price-per-bit has dropped by a factor of one thousand in the twenty years since I bought that first drive.

And the reliability and performance have increased by a great margin, too.

I haven't bought any memory lately, but the first memory I ever bought was sometime in 1995 for my son's first computer.

I paid $35 per MEGABYTE for it.

4 meg of memory cost me about $150 out the door back then, and IIRC it wasn't even EDO (Extended Data Output) memory, just "regular" FPM, or "Fast Page Memory".

Today, 4 GIG of memory is about $25 at Newegg, or  greater than FOUR THOUSAND times cheaper.

And it's much faster memory, to boot.

I'm not sure if this makes me feel old or not......

9 comments:

  1. My first PC was a turbo XT clone, clocking (once you pressed the "turbo" button) at two megahertz. And with that blistering speed came a 40 megabyte hard drive, a 5 1/4" floppy drive, and an amber-on-black CGA CRT. I think we paid around $300 for the thing, back around 1990. We thought it was magic. :) And yeah, I do feel old, now that you mention it.

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  2. Those things were like $1500~$1800 when they were new in the 1980's!

    One of the guys I work with on the Iowa remembers his first new hard drive. It was 30 meg, and cost $900, and then you had to cough up another $200 or so for the controller card.

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  3. My 1st PC, I think 1988, was an XT. I went with a Hercules video card, because CGA just sucked so badly on resolution. I kitted that thing out with the full 640KB, and a 3.5" floppy, in addition to the 10MB drive and 5.25" floppy. The whole package was over $2000 -- I think $2300. Replacing the 8088 with a Nec V20 was significant performance increase. IIRC, the Turbo switch got me 10MHz. Fun times.

    I just recently upgraded my old Core2-Duo system. New mobo, i3 CPU, and 8GB ram, for $200 and change.

    Did you see the latest 2TB thumb drive?

    Yeah, starting to feel a little old.

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    Replies
    1. A 2 TB thumb drive......it boggles my mind!

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  4. Haha. We were on Okinawa in the late 80s, early 90s. I remember when the hard drives were external and if you could afford a 25 MEGABYTE drive, you were doing good. And it was probably used at that! And it was a big, blocky drive. I seem to recall the first external ones were all mostly 10 megs.

    In Nebraska, mid 80s, Commodore 64. TRS-80. I don't remember what the IBMs were. Commodore 64 used a cassette tape. Oh, can't forget ATARI with the PONG game!
    Our first screens were the green screens. Except for the Atari on the tv which used black and white!

    I remember the XT clone. I LOVED my Commodore SX-64. The transportable, 25 pound computer, I think it was? With it's little 5 inch COLOR screen built in! Computer, keyboard, 5 1/4 inch floppy AND the 3 and a half inch hard disk drive, a complete unit! The keyboard unlatched from the console- it protected the screen and drives when closed; and connected by cord. Used it the whole year my tour in Korea, and the 4 or 5 years on Okinawa. I sold it before we rotated back and I wish I still had it.

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    1. I still have and use my Commodore 128. For what I use it for, it works perfectly.

      I had my original Comofore 64 until a few months ago. I had been damaged in my move here from my apartment, and my wife was constantly harping on me to throw it away, so it wound up in the dumpster.

      I kept the power supply, though. It went for $65 on eBay!

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    2. Nice on getting a little extra money! Sorry you lost the computer in the move. They are finicky about that sort of thing.

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  5. You should have seen the pricing in 1986.....let us not discuss computation!l horsepower either. Or modem speeds. Or network speeds......

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  6. One of the guys I volunteer with on the Iowa told me he paid $900 for a 10 MEG disk back then, and had to buy a $300 controller card to use it in his PC.

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Keep it civil, please....

Gloomy, Gritty, Grey Day

 At 1700 local it's as described in the headline; 30*F, 88% RH, completely overcast, snowing like crazy (small flakes, but lots of them)...