I just replaced my 10-year-old laptop computer with a used one five years newer and a bunch of gigabytes more powerful for less than $300. That got me thinking about the price tags on early computers.
The very first “personal computer,” built in 1957 was the IBM 610. It was the size of a refrigerator and cost $55,000.
The Commodore desktop computer cost $1,300 in 1980 – about what my MacBook Pro cost three years ago.
I remember in the early 80s my Dad crowing proudly about his TRS 80 that he bought at Radio Shack for $800. You had to load cassette tapes into it to make it work and each line of type had to start with the next sequential number. I remember getting a letter from him. The last line said, “680: Love, Dad.”
In the mid 1980s I got one of the new, more powerful computers at work. It had a 150-megabyte hard drive and a whopping 20 megs of memory. Later when we started our own business our operations manager had the biggest, baddest, most powerful computer available. It had a half-gig hard drive and an unprecedented 40 megs of memory. It was also the most expensive at a thousand bucks-plus.
An ad in today’s paper offers a new desktop computer with a 160-gig hard drive and two gigs of memory for $129. It also has a high-resolution color monitor and wireless Internet capability.
To put this into perspective, your new smartphone is about the same speed as the average computer available in 1990. And your $400 iPad is faster than any computer made prior to 1994, and for a fraction of the cost.
I can hardly wait to see what things cost next year.
