A computer 13 years ago cost...

[mcs328]

$4408. I found an old purchase order from 13 years ago as I was cleaning up. Pentium 133Mhz, 32Mb RAM, 2 gig HD, 1.44 floppy, 6x cd-rom, 17" Monitor, speakers, sound blaster card, keyboard, mouse, 2MB graphics card with DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11 = $4408.

Wow.

[Hoser]

I wish I still had some older issues of Computer Shopper (when it used to be huge) just to look at some of the ads. I never spent that much on a computer, but I bought a 4X Sony CD writer when everyone around me had 2X writers. I think I paid $400 for it.

[Jeffbx]

I might be able to beat that - I bought an IBM PS/2 model 70, 16Mhz 386, 2MB RAM, 30MB HD, 12" VGA screen, DOS 5 and Windows 3.0 - it was slightly north of $5k. I think I bought it in 1990?

[mcs328]

I might be able to beat that - I bought an IBM PS/2 model 70, 16Mhz 386, 2MB RAM, 30MB HD, 12" VGA screen, DOS 5 and Windows 3.0 - it was slightly north of $5k. I think I bought it in 1990?

Wow. This purchase order was from July 1996. Who had that kind of money back then?

[attgig]

pretty sure my parents paid 3500 for an apple IIgs back in the 80's.

i remember going to college in 97, i built my first system, and spent ~ 3300 bucks with no monitor. that's when re-writable drives first came out, and I got the first one...a ricoh 6x-r 2x rw.

along with that was the Slot a PII266 and a 6.4 ibm deskstar. board was a supermicro, and can't remember how much ram i had.

got a huge huge huge case that i wish i didn't get after moving a couple times in college.

lol.

that sucked.

[InfiniteNothing]

You can probably dump 4k in a top of the line computer if you really wanted to /devil's advocate

[Devhux]

i remember going to college in 97, i built my first system, and spent ~ 3300 bucks with no monitor. that's when re-writable drives first came out, and I got the first one...a ricoh 6x-r 2x rw.

I'm presuming the Ricoh MP6200S (complete with SCSI card). If so, that's the same model I ended up getting for Christmas that year. :)

[Hoser]

If you were to compare the price of computers then and now taking into account inflation and computing power, how would they compare?

I still have an original IBM XT with a full height floppy, hard drive, keyboard, and hercules monochrome graphics. It still works.

[Prngr44]

I still have my first computer I purchased... DX266. I remember paying another $250 for a 450MB hard drive ("You'll never fill this sucker up!")

Good times...good times.

[Markel]

I have a PC Mall catalog from about 10 years back (I use it to "blackout" a section of a window fan that I use in the summer, so I've always just kept it with the fan). I get a kick out of one of the cover "features": a 366 MHz Celeron (HP Pavilion) system with 64MB RAM , 4.3GB hard drive, CDROM, modem, Win 98 all for $749!!

[attgig]

I'm presuming the Ricoh MP6200S (complete with SCSI card). If so, that's the same model I ended up getting for Christmas that year. :)



that's the one!

[Thesifer]

I got a christmas present one year .. a 324 mb HD for $340

[zippyjuan]

My personal computer history does not go that far back- my first was an Athlon XP-2400 you guys helped me put together but I do remember when the first DVD burners came out- cost about $500 and everybody wanted one. Now you can pick one up for about $25. Amazing.

[Prngr44]

http://www.radford.edu/wkovarik/class/images/FutureComputer.jpg

[Markel]

http://www.radford.edu/wkovarik/class/images/FutureComputer.jpg

Complete with a submarine "steering wheel" - how realistic!

[nate el bueno]

I recall a couple years ago figuring out with Markel how much our hardware would be worth in these time periods. I think a 2gb stick of ram would "technically" be worth around 15 million or something?

[Prngr44]

I recall a couple years ago figuring out with Markel how much our hardware would be worth in these time periods. I think a 2gb stick of ram would "technically" be worth around 15 million or something?

At least. I remember seeing invoices for half-meg CARDS of memory for a couple hundred dollars. These were in IBM XTs.

[PitViper]

I got a christmas present one year .. a 324 mb HD for $340
I paid $325 for a 65 MB RLL-format hard drive to upgrade my Tandy 1000, a decent Computer Shopper deal at the time. That translates to $5 million per terabyte (not even taking inflation into account). At that time a 20 MB hard drive was pretty much the standard. I also paid around $200 for a used 287 math co-processor which was paired with the soldered on-board 286 processor chip. That was the last (and only) PC that I did not build myself.

That was more than 13 years ago, of course. (My very first computer was a TI 99-4A, with 16 kb of memory. AWESOME!)

[Hoser]

In the late 80's - early 90's it was decided that Ada was the language we were going to use as our programming language (Air Force). A 4MB card with the compiler cost $4096 (odd that it was that number). We set it up as a ramdrive and compiled our source code on it instead of the hard drive.

[kimchicowboy]

wow, i remember building my first computer the summer of '99 for college. i forget how much i spent (amd k6/2 proc., cd-rom, 15" monitor, NIC, nvidia card, i forget the RAM, HDD) but i'm sure it was <$1k.

btw, the computer sucked. the CPU kept overheating on me. haha

[tupacboy]

i remember buying my first 2x burner... summer of 97... i thought i was shizznit with that bad boy... I could burn 2 cd's an hour and I thought that was amazing...

[ShawnLee]

My brother and I went to Fry's in... '94? Picked up 4 megs of RAM and couldn't believe that we were getting that much power in our... 486? Or was this before with our 386?

Shoot. I remember getting the 386 and being blown away after our green screen monochromatic XT.

Now that I read how much you guys spent and the specs that you were running back then, a small twinge of me is jealous for my younger (and even more broke than now) self. Dude! Two gigs of hard drive space!

[GilbertsGrape]

i remember the first pc i bought and i am not even 30
a PC Partner 486SX 33 with 4mb ram upgraded to 8mb ram at $50 a MB. 110mb hard drive.

First PC i ever used was a TRS80 (trash 80's) 8" floppy disk.
http://www.vintagecomputing.com/wp-content/images/retroscan/trs_model12_small.jpg
http://www.pdp8.net/rx02/small/floppies.jpg
2 or 3 MB hard drive. then i was able to use an Apple IIe
http://www.vectronicsappleworld.com/collection/articlepics/appleiiplatinum/snap42.jpg
and then we got IBM model 25 Value point PC's
http://oracle-internals.com/images/ibm8525.jpg
on a token ring network booted off a 3.5" floppy. and then using a hole punch to make Double density 5.25 disk out of standard Density disk. (rebels)

it is amazing how things have changed. I talk with my wife's grand parents that are 85 years old and try to explain using a PVR or DVR and they are amazed. He talks about hiking to the top of the mountain running Antenna cable to their antenna and being able to pick up 2 or 3 TV stations. (we live in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky, we get the Saturday night grand old opery on Tuesday)lol

talk about advancement.

[GilbertsGrape]

oh i forgot Daisy Wheel printers in those large enclosures as big as one of those travel car toppers to keep them quiet

[GilbertsGrape]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GV9kZMXwDwM

[Daedalus]

Wow, that's some nostalgia there. We had an Apple II+, a very early model. My father used it for business. I just played games on it. Don't know if there was a hard drive option, but we didn't have one. Same for our first couple clones...no hard drives...and I mostly just played games on them. When I went to college in 1990 my parents bought me a clone and I was stoked it came with a 40MB hard drive...I could finally store my games on the computer. Lol.

[Jeffbx]

Dang I feel like the old man here...

The very first computer I ever saw was nothing more than a teletype-type machine - looked like a printer connected to a modem. And the modem was one like you took your phone handset & popped it into these circular rubber connectors, where it hummed away at a blazing 300 baud. I was in first or second grade then, and it was my friend's dad's machine, who worked at DuPont.

Then the TRS-80, Commodore Pet, Apple II+, Apple IIe, Commodore 64, Original Mac (no hard drive!), IBM PC XT and AT, then finally on to "IBM clone" machines.

[Devhux]

This was technically my first computer:

http://members.shaw.ca/devhux/adam.jpg

...although we knew something was up when my Buck Rogers: Planet of Doom tape stopped working shortly after trying the system. Considering the printer didn't work well either, we returned it fairly soon afterwards.