Compute the Cost
When computers first became personal (according to Mr JM) they were rather expensive. You can get a cell phone now for one tenth the cost of his first computer and the phone will out-perform the XT computer in every way. With a printer, he paid nearly $3,000 for a one megabyte, twin floppy drive XT computer. The floppy disks held 360kb (that’s right kilo-bytes, not megabytes) each.
His first hard disk came six months later and was a whopping thirty megabytes!
Not only was $3,000 a lot more money back then, you get a lot more bang for your buck now - the same money will get a high end computer with lots of memory and hard disk and a nice wide LCD screen.
Memory is what makes you computer run - the programs are the instructions for what it is to do but without memory space to run in, the programs can do very little. These days you can buy two gigabytes of memory for a couple of hundred dollars. (and Vista needs that amount at least)
Bill Gates is widely quoted as saying that 640kb is all anyone should ever need for memory - he denies ever saying it now, but with the business Microsoft got into with Intel, he would distance himself from such a quote at any cost.
With Hard Disk prices falling almost daily, it is possible to buy 500 gigabytes of hard disk for under $200 - that’s about one hundred DVD’s. With movies on the internet compressed to maybe a tenth the size of the DVD version, you could store well over a thousand movies on a hard disk that size. And with the media player we have or maybe one that takes the Desktop Computer version of hard disk, those movies are all playable on almost any equipment.
Computer monitors are also diving in price. Mr JM’s first screen was a 14 inch colou screen - the colour was green. He played a computer game that was all green text - Cave Quest, where the computer described the location and he typed in simple instructions like ‘kill dwarf’.
Now, monitors are taken for granted as they display millions of colours at frame rates suitable for Hi-definition movies and they get ever cheaper. A 22 inch widescreen monitor, with speakers & HD inputs now sells for just over the $300 mark. Twelve months back the smaller version of the same screen was around $900.
Computers have never been more powerful nor have they been cheaper.
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