I'm so grateful my father (RIP) came home with a Commodore VIC-20 from Sears in 1983.
We were incredibly poor, so my mother nearly killed him, but he insisted that personal computers were here to stay, and that his children needed to become acquainted.
Nearly 40 years later, he was right. I have made, and continue to make, a great living on these crazy machines.
We were not incredibly poor, although we probably would have been considered as such by US standards (which I'm sure were quite different at the time from Czechoslovak standards). We did have to smuggle our C64 over the Iron Curtain though, so I hope that this counts as something.
Stories like this fascinate me. (I've lived in the US my entire life so it's just completely foreign to my worldview.) What was logistically involved in getting ahold of one? And what were the "legal" alternatives?
> What was logistically involved in getting ahold of one?
Having a grandfather who left the country in 1968 for West Germany gifting me one when we visited him.
> And what were the "legal" alternatives?
Buying one at an outrageous markup in an exclusive shop. I don't remember the exact number (although I could find it out) but the price tag was something like five month of average Czechoslovak wages at the time. Apparently in the US the equivalent would have been paying $10000 for one (in 1988, mind you). Of course in Germany it cost something like 299 DM or so...
In Poland for a very long time private ownership of typewriters, fax machines, radio transmitters and computers was illegal without special permissions (>3 year prison term). You have to remember this was the time CIA was smuggling those to Poland with the help of Church. https://www.nytimes.com/1992/02/18/world/reagan-and-pope-rep...
>The report in Time adds many new details, particularly the role of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Roman Catholic Church in opening networks across which telephones, fax machines, printing presses, photocopiers, computers and intelligence information moved to Solidarity.
Personal possession anecdote from book "High-tech za żelazną kurtyną. Elektronika, komputery i systemy sterowania w PRL" (978-83-8098-094-5)
>In 1984, "Informatyka" magazine, involved in the dissemination of these machines, reported on the adventures of Mr. Przemysław, who received in April [...] a package from his brother in Toronto, containing the VIC-20 microcomputer, power supply, cassette recorder, a set of cassettes for television games and English language learning and connecting cables. The Customs Office in Gdynia refused to issue an import license, stating that it could issue [...] only if the computer was necessary for the citizen's professional or scientific work
It slowly got better in second half of the 80s. COCOM relaxed import sanctions in 1984 on low end 8bit gaming machines:
>The breakthrough in the domestication of computers in Poland took place
in the mid-1980s, most likely between 1984 and 1986. In the global context, this
might have been relatively late, but in the context of the Eastern bloc it seems that
Poland was within the norm. There are two main reasons behind this chronology: one international, one local. Firstly, on an international level, the embargo on 8-bit technology was relaxed in 1984. Computers had been at the heart of the
CoCom debate since the mid-1970s, but – as Mastanduno reports – it was not
until July 1984 that the embargo on the most popular 8-bit microcomputers was
removed, even though at the same time new restrictions were introduced regarding various telecommunications software and solutions.
In 1985 you could finally legally buy 8bit Atari in Pewex - chain of shops exclusively accepting $western currency$. Personal ownership of western currency was illegal :-) but regime was running low on foreign cash to repay international loans so they came up with this brilliant plan of opening shops where you could spend your smuggled black market money semi officially.
>Secondly, on a local level, as Kluska reports, in the autumn of 1984, the “[Polish] customs office
ceased to make it difficult for citizens to import microcomputer equipment.”
Yep, we traded in our Atari VCS (2600) with 23 cartridges for an Atari 400 and two game cartridges (Missile Command and Pac-Man). He spent money that was in short supply to buy a 410 (tape recorder) and the BASIC cartridge. We learned to program and that made all of the difference years on.
There was a small slice of time where consumer, programmable computers were affordable to a large audience in the 80's and very early 90's. Adding to that era was the magazines that provided amazing content such as programs and news. Antic, Byte, Creative Computing, and Dr. Dobbs were the building blocks.
What I really loved about those magazines, living in a small town, was how they simultaneously showed you the variety of what was out there, mostly through the small ads, and the speculative future of the technology through the articles, while also giving a kid the ability to grow their skills Right Now in the form of printed-out programs.
Lucky you! I had the BASIC cartdrige for the... Atari 2600. It'd come with a joystick in two split halves which, if I remember correctly, you had to plug in the joystick ports (so one in each port). My memory may be failing me for it was a very long time ago. I still fondly remember the first lines I drew, in colors, using BASIC. One of my very first program.
I had BASIC for the Atari 2600 (called Atari VCS at the time). It came with two controllers that had membrane keyboards. There were not enough keys for the alphabet so you had to use key modifiers to type the full A-Z and 0-9 character set. It was immensely tedious and really a bummer to use. I’m surprised you got far enough to do graphics with it. I dont recall being able to do anything except every simple text-based things like:
Yup I wrongly wrote "joystick" split in two halves but I meant a keyboard split in two halves. It's the same as you describe. I don't remember much: maybe I'm mistaken my memories of the 2600 for those of the 600 XL.
BBC Micro for me round these parts but same idea. The 80s were a golden age for bedroom coders and the various 8-bit machines round the world launched thousands of careers. The fact that the machines came with a programming language (and even booted straight into it) gave many cause to experiment. It faded out in the 90s when the concept of what a home computer was changed.
We weren’t well off either, but my dad was able to get a decent deal when our neighbor upgraded. It was put into my room for lack of space - and the rest is history.
For sooooo long the upgrade cycle was so short that you could live quite cheaply and comfortably by inserting yourself in the right place in the chain.
In college I’d upgrade every three to six months and sell the old system off to someone for a good percentage of the new hotness.
Exact same computer, and we were poor too. I learned BASIC on it and basically never stopped coding since then. It’s strange to think about how different my life might have been without that computer.
Similar story. Learned Logo at school on a Vic-20. Loved it so much I taught myself Basic at Kmart by grabbing the Basic User's Guide off the shelf and typing stuff into one of the C64s on the display case. It impressed my dad so much he put one on layaway. Been programming ever since.
Same, except it was a C64. Many happy days and nights spent learning BASIC and later 6502 assembly with 3 metres of snow on the ground outside and pitch black by 3:30 pm.
i have a similar story about a 486 from the 90s. i have a lot of skills now and can do things many other people cannot, include make a lot of money if i want. but look around you, and ask, how does your personal wealth in this industry, which people are now forced to participate in to access basic life needs like food and transportation and social services, represent "progress" for anyone but you? are our operating systems secure? do they respect our privacy? or are we being spied on and stolen from by an increasingly ubiquitous industry with no conscience or self awareness?
> access basic life needs like food and transportation and social services
You are so very right. Do we even realize that smart cell phones have become a required utility? So 25 years ago I would have had a $50 phone bill instead of a $500 phone bill for phones that are required for me to do anything with my government, like renew a driver's license.
Many made fun of "Obama phones," but I think I understand the point of them. I'm not a fan of these phones (and technology in general) leaving people behind because they cannot pay for it.
> or are we being spied on and stolen from by an increasingly ubiquitous industry with no conscience or self awareness
In the name of "security." Yes, we are being spied on and treated as human batteries, just like in the Matrix.
no, people still act like mobile phones are luxury items. they're not. they're cheap, but rent isn't. it's very easy to be homeless and have a phone. all it means is that you can complain and be literally dying on the street but someone on some social media app will say it can't be that bad, you're on the internet :p a lot of "nerd" culture is still living in a world more than ten years gone, a world of precocious suburban kids on their desktop computers… it's not like that now…
(haha wow, speaking of which, hn edits emoji out of posts on this site, amazing)
> or are we being spied on and stolen from by an increasingly ubiquitous industry with no conscience or self awareness?
It sounds like you're equating "tech industry" with Big Tech¹, but the tech industry is not an evil monolith. Even Alphabet is not an evil monolith, Apple is a radically different beast than Meta, etc.
If you've decided that working in tech is default evil, you could choose a political path focused on breaking up and regulating Big Tech. But there are also plenty of good people leveraging tech for good, too.
greed is evil, and i see you all every day getting paid to fuck up our world. i see you online and i see you in person when you try to spend your money on me and services i provide. you have not succeeded in distinguishing yourself, you are all members of a technocratic class enriching itself at the expense of our environmental resources.
The Living Computer Museum in Seattle is closing down. Paul Allen's estate, who gave so much money and built several Seattle organizations, seems to be focusing money elsewhere.
Like Bill Gates philanthropy, I assume they believe focusing resources towards vaccines and other general population philanthropic investments is more important.
The Living Computer Museum was unique. I remember especially they had a room set up like an old 80s living room with an Atari VCS 2600, and a window looking outside. It wasn't important in the sense of "progress", but it provided a shared historical perspective.
bill gates promoted one of the most brutal and polluting industries in the world, a complete environmental disaster rooted in slavery, with the phrase "a PC on every desk". he created a horrible and bloated ecosystem that has plagued our lives and he has just attempted to do the same with an insane biosecurity apparatus. i never want to hear any of these people's opinions on vaccines or anything like this again. they are dangerous worthless frauds. philanthropy is just what gates turned to after he got chased out of his own business for sexual harassment.
The kid down the road from me in rural VA had no indoor plumbing, but had a VIC 20.
I eventually got a C64, but that was after my dad brought home a IBM PC for a few months to do chemical calculations in a spreadsheet. He said it was revolutionary that he could put this machine on the factory floor reactor and develop plug-in-chug calculations for reactions.
He also contracted a local EE to develop a CNC marine buoy winding machine based on the PC. I remember talking to the guy as a kid and he said it was compiled BASIC. It interfaced to the gantry motors and servo system via a giant, custom control board he made.
I suspect some statistical weirdness going on in the precise formulation of the survey question.
I know for a fact 30M commodore 64s were sold in the 80s in the USA. Not all commodores, not all home computers, just the classic model C64, 30M units sold. That's in a country that used to only have 250M people, so in theory 12% of Americans as of 1990 had purchased one specific model, the C64, leaving only 3% for all other models combined, which seems very unlikely.
Some of those probably went to schools not homes, although schools were owned by Apple II in those days...
My suspicion is many of those were unused in basements and closets, or the question was phrased weirdly like "have you purchased a computer in the last three years" or "used a home computer in the last month" or they defined "home computer" to be "not an IBM (office) or Apple (school) product" or something like that.
Wikipedia says between 12m and 17m were manufactured, in total.
Trammel claimed 30m based on a remembered estimate of rough sales numbers per year, but the only estimate that’s based on objective evidence - serial number analysis - is 12.5m.
I would tend to believe the linked site's serial number analysis result of exactly 12.5M. The americans did something like that to the germans in WWII, it turns out a remarkably small totally random sample of sequentially assigned serial numbers is enough to very accurately predict the highest number sold. Assuming very random sampling, which is never truly random, of course.
Doesn't change the overall outcome, however, when there's a stat that a small segment of an industry is "about" the size of what's claimed to be the entire industry, something's off in the numbers.
A mere 12.5M sold remains 5% of the entire USA population at that time, and honestly, having been there, almost everyone I knew had a PC clone or some apple product, usually a mac. The number must be larger than 10%. "a computer" was required at college ... ed.gov claims there are 19.4 M college students in the USA right now and google claims 332M people in the USA right now, so about 6% of the population are in college right now, so back in 1990 guess "around" 6% of the population was required to own a computer just to attend higher ed ... the claimed 10% seems like an incredibly low number.
In 1990? No way. I was taking college courses (for HS credit) in 1990, and the first I heard of a requirement to bring your own computer was years after that.
Another thing that skews the numbers is that my household during the 80s had two Color Computers, a C64, and an Amiga 500, but no one else in my social circle had anything more general than a Nintendo or Atari console.
I was in college in the latter half of 1980s. Computers were very much in use at the time for writing papers, and some classes required them for other work. Students were not expected to actually own one, however -- they would go to labs around campus which were basially just rooms full of PCs loaded up with all the common software.
Computer Science courses generally just required a remote dumb terminal, such as a VT100 or ADM 3a. These were available in a few rooms around campus as well.
In UK universities at least, circa 1990 we had computer labs/rooms which were home to dumb terminals, or if you were lucky, Atari STs running a terminal emulator. Some of us brought our home computers to university, they were mostly Atari STs and Amigas - I actually lugged my Amstrad CPC6128 and colour monitor to campus, but never used it for course work as there was no networking in the dorm rooms. Some new-build rooms had it by 1990, and a few people had PCs linked to it by then, but only used as terminals to the mainframes and minis on the campus network.
One person on my course caused a minor stir by bringing a "laptop" to a lecture to take notes in about 1991 - the keyboard was so noisy that they only did it once!
I went to grad school for business in the mid-80s. I had a computer but I doubt there were more than a handful of other people in my class who had one. While I was there they went from a very limited computer lab in the basement with a few Macs, a Lisa!, and some DEC terminals to a much bigger lab of 286s off the library.
I was a freshman in nerd school in 1986. Out of the 8 frosh on my hall, only 2 had their own computers (I was not one of them). I don't think any of the seniors in the singles on the other side of the hall had computers either.
I graduated in 1990 and owning a personal computer capable of running a C or Pascal compiler useful for academic work was an impossible dream. I was lucky enough to have an Amiga, but a C compiler such as Aztec C cost serious money back then. Open source existed but GCC started out on Vax and even by 1990 I think it only ran on very expensive systems like Unix minis and workstations.
As late as the mid-90s in California, some kids showed up at university without a computer. There were PC and Mac labs on campus that were open pretty late, as well as VT100 terminal labs open 24/7 (though these were only used by most students to check email between classes and were on the way out).
Even in 2000 computers weren’t required - the school had a computer lab you could use if needed, and it was only a few years before that they had begun requiring essays and papers to be printed from a computer.
My sister had a “word processor” for college in the mid 90s, it did spreadsheet stuff and had a floppy drive and a monochrome monitor, maybe those count as a computer too?
when I went to school, each school usually had only one or 2 apple ][s -- but we had a whole classroom of PETs in 7th grade that got replaced by a classroom of C64 in 8th grade. I saved up and bought a TRS-80 CoCo 2, otherwise there would not have been a computer in our house.
Maybe. 15% sounds about right to me. Back in 1990 computers were expensive, bulky devices, required specialized knowledge to operate (Apple's ad copy notwithstanding), and had limited use outside of a few specific domains.
Kinda amazing that nowadays anyone can go to a store and get a "super" computer that fits in their pockets in the form of a smartphone. Want to video call someone across the world? Buy one of those, setup an account for the Apple/Google store (yay walled garden), install WhatsApp or your messenger of choice, and ring ring!
Funny how many of the ads say "Call us for more information about our offerings!" instead of a "For more info: www....".
We're talking about mass market adoption. Most people (by which I mean not-HN) weren't using acoustic-coupled modems over device-specific ports to dial into BBSs over long distance lines.
Computer control of modems using standardized Hayes(+) command sets over RS-232 serial ports (1981), the Bell breakup (1984) and subsequent competition, and increased modem manufacturer competition breaking price-per-baud standards and increasing affordability (~1988) were required enablers to take it mass market.
It took until the early 90s that you could (a) buy a PC at a reasonable price, (b) buy a modem at a reasonable price (that was guaranteed to work with your PC), (c) dial into an ISP's local number... from anywhere in the US.
Yes, some people lived in NYC, Chicago, SF, etc. and had access to knowledge and BBS infrastructure at local rates earlier than that, but most people didn't.
Only fifteen percent of American households had a computer in 1990.
People overestimate the speed of the spread of computers.
I didn't have a computer where I worked until 1994. And then, it was shared by eight people.
At my next job in 1995, I made them buy a computer for the office as a term of employment. At the time, I suggested that a laptop might be a good option, since the computer would be shared by three people. For the next two years, the sales guys made fun of me for wanting to put a computer, and for wanting one that fits on my lap.
I later heard that when I left, they sold the computer. I wonder how those blissfully computer-free sales guys are doing today.
When I worked for Westinghouse in 1996 was the first time I was in an office that has one computer per person. But not every department had computers at all. And most who did were just terminals hooked up to a Vax in accounting.
When I worked for a large regional media company in 1997, everyone had a computer. Only a couple of them had internet access, and that was only e-mail. This was during the days when so many people were getting AOL at home that it became uselessly bogged down by its own popularity.
1999: Everyone in the office had their own computer. Not everyone used them. But at least they all had internet access.
(OT: I'm sad that the macOS spell checker didn't know the word "Vax" just now)
Your comment is about business use of computers, not households. I worked at a Fortune 200 company and from 1985-1989 much of my job was helping roll out desktop computers and networking (including email) throughout our fairly large geographical territory. By 1990 I'd estimate conservatively that well over half of our office workers had their own networked PC on their desk.
I remember buying an AST 386 for my use at home, I'm guessing it cost about $4K or more in today's dollars, so it is true that business-class PCs at home were probably relatively rare at that time.
In 1995, I started replacing the WYSE VT-100 terminals at my small workplace with Pentium desktops, in order to prepare for the switch to client-server in the next ERP version. They averaged fron $2700/ea ($5100 today) data entry models, to $3500 for mine, to $5200 ($9800 today) for the mechanical engineering system. (I still have my notes.)
I know this isn’t relevant to the point about usage in 1990, but it shocks me (as somebody born in 1995) that over the course of 4 years you went from being ridiculed over demanding a computer to a computer on everyone’s desk. 4 years!
I remember in the late 80s most people could not type. Typing was done by secretaries and was a specialized skill. There were (optional) for-credit classes in high school dedicated to teaching typing and nothing else.
I got a bunch of part-time temp office jobs as a teenager because I could type fast, having grown up with computers, while my friends would get jobs at supermarkets or convenience stores, etc.
The temp agencies had me do typing tests (on typewriters, not computers) before placing me. I blew them away at some ungodly WPM speed that I no longer remember. Not atypical by todays standards, I’m sure, but standards were different then.
Often I would be the only person in a small office who could type. I certainly was the only male who could type. Everyone else was female.
One of the fun things about my mother was that as a teenager she'd been taught to type.
She grew up in roughly the same area where we lived when I was a kid, and so she actually want to a previous iteration of a girl's school I've visited in the 1990s, but back then as well as sex segregated selective education (ie my school was specifically for boys who "tested well" at age 12, hers was for girls who likewise tested well at age 12) the assumptions about future life roles were... very static. She wasn't doing well enough to be sent to University, so the assumption was she'd get a secretarial type job, and probably marry in her 20s, get pregnant and drop out of the work force.
So, they taught her to type. This is the 1960s, so she's not learning Word, she's learning how to use a manual typewriter, because it's expected she'll be in a typing pool, maybe a clerk, or at most a PA. She actually had very different ideas of what she'd do, and after finishing her course turned down a Computer Operator job because it wouldn't lead to what she was interested in - but in the end as predicted she ended up married, pregnant (with me) and giving up work in 1975.
Anyway, fast forward twenty years, my sister and I have "flown the nest" so to speak and money is tight, my father has been made redundant and will never have another white collar job for the rest of his life - so she gets an administrative job. Understandably they want somebody who can type, and she checks the box even though she's been out of the workforce for twenty years. Hasn't much idea how to use Word or indeed Windows, but she's fairly smart and can muddle along. It's interesting how unexpectedly that skill, which she didn't really value at the time, was crucial to her again.
Eventually the IT stuff was too much for her, and she took early retirement because both the extra IT training and the constant pressure to "do more with less" (the government likes the idea of a powerful military, but doesn't like spending money on it, she was an administrator for the Ministry of Defence) made it intolerable. But if she'd never learned typing as a teenager I think she'd have really struggled to find work with a "Homemaker gap" in her CV matching the IT revolution.
Well... I remember in 1996 when first working on the US west coast at a research institute that the prof. would have his admin assistant print-out emails; he would hand-write responses that the admin assistant would type into the computer :-D
I worked for a large computer systems company starting in the second half of the 80s. We had minicomputer based email all along--we made the computers and the software. But there were definitely execs who did likewise.
I took a similar typing test on a typewriter and managed to get in 65 words per minute for the required text, due to my time with computers.
But I barely passed, because there was no error correction allowed. No backspace key. Although business typewriters of the time often had the ability to let you correct at least one character, either by buffering a few keystrokes or with actual "white out" over-printing, it was just as common to find yourself working for someone with a cheap typewriter and a bottle of white paint.
That was 1988. Summer job temp placement office at hometown university.
I attended college far away, a place noted for its computer science department, where there were $20,000 workstations on campus for the department's students. I don't know how many students had their own machines in the dorm, but the ratio on our floor was 1/12.
Calculators had a similar trajectory. I used slide rules throughout high school. I needed a calculator for college and got a TI engineering calculator for probably something like $200 in mid-70s dollars. Got a probably discontinued HP a couple of years later for probably the same amount. Not sure how long before they were ubiquitous in the general population but probably not more than 5 years or so.
That's an interesting experience, because my family got our first home computer in about 1981, the kid down the street had one, and there was one in my first grade class around the same time. From then on, they were available in every school I attended, and my (rural Oregon) highschool in the early 90s had four computer labs - for programming, typing, newspaper layout, and CAD. My friend and I were watching AcidWarp on his 386 in about 1991. I had an Amiga at that point, and it was actually a bit of a relic even though it could blow my friend's PC out of the water for certain things. Our town library had a computer system and the office where my dad worked had a Data General mainframe they called the "DG". By 1993 I had a Linux box that I was running as a BBS, and I saw HTML for the first time in the Army in 1995. Then one day I stepped off a train at a random stop in Pusan, Korea in 1996 and some dude about my age walked up and said hi, and we ended up hanging out with his friends and they showed me a Mac with a web browser...and the world was never the same again.
Different contexts. Uptake in homes was swift. I had a home computer in 1982. But my comment was about computers in offices.
Businesses change slowly. Equipment doesn't get replaced on a whim. It has to be amortized and there's tax thingies that mean business equipment lifecycles are 3 to 5 years, minimum.
That's a good point. We had computers in our homes a lot of the time, and in schools I believe they were subsidized by tech companies like Apple. The 80s and 90s businesses that I got to see basically had antiquated mainframes and mini computers. The Army had PCs for office use, but the field equipment was VAX or (in the case of our anti-aircraft radar) some obscure form of Unix. That said, you still couldn't swing a cat without bumping it into a CRT.
In 1990, it would have been somewhat rare for a college student to own a computer, but there were computer labs everywhere on campus and you had an email address, so it was clear they a part of modern life. They were priced in the 'used car' range so it wasn't impossible to own one.
(edit this was for a 'real' PC compatible or Mac, you could probably find C64s and etc at the flea market.)
In my freshman year in 1993, I was the only person on my floor to haul a PC into the dorms. Across 4 buildings each with a dozen floors, there was maybe ten people who had computers in their room. The only reason I had one was because dad was an IBMer and he managed to obtain an XT 286 for me.
Same year, and every engineering and CS student I knew had one in their dorm room. The lowest spec I saw was 386SX-16 with 2 MB and the highest was 486DX-50 with 16 MB RAM. Most used DOS/Windows but the CS students dual booted to Linux (Slackware mostly, some SLS).
Similar, I had a Mac SE and was maybe the only person in my dorm section to have a new personal computer. But I also knew someone who had bought a Yugo, which was more expensive.
Anecdotally, I remember being excited for my dad to get a computer around 1994 or 1995, and it was a Mac IIci. A bunch of people I know got computers around then or within the next couple years, but before that it wasn't much of a thing. One of my earliest computer memories was using ClarisWorks Paint and spending (what seemed like) hours drawing a scarecrow while my parents watched, and then the computer crashed and it was all lost.
My mom had a word processor around then as well (can't remember which came first), a single purpose device for writing with a keyboard, a CRT monitor, and a printer. Looked somewhat like this[0] but I can't remember whether it was the same brand or not.
I remember painting abstract primate pictures with MacPaint when I was quite young. I was sad when we got the new computer because I think MacPaint didn’t make the transition to system 7 or something, and my dad told me we couldn’t open the files.
We also had a IIci. It came out I’m 89, and I was shocked to learn how insanely expensive it was at launch - $6000… $14k adjusted for inflation.
That was the era of really expensive computers, but each upgrade really seemed to do something phenomenally new - color or resolution or printer or 3D etc.
Nowadays it’s hard to really notice the upgrades without running benchmarks.
We (in Germany) didn’t have one until I was 12 in 1998, before that I’d visit my dad at work sometimes to play Prince of Persia on his office computer. I guess technically we had a Sinclair ZX81 in the cellar, but I wouldn’t find out about that till much later ;)
We (in Germany), by 1998, had 3 computers at home: a 400 mhz celeron connected to the internet, a hand me down 486 for my brother, and a hand me down 386 for me. All me friends were starting to get access to pentiums with tnts, by 2000 everybody was playing UT and counterstike.
Sometime in the mid-90s the local Microcenter had a deal on a $999 PC. IIR it was running Windows-95, but was otherwise a bare-minimum system. The "deal" was that the PC also had an ad infested border around the screen that ate up some non-trivial amount of the screen space.
The line to buy it would through nearly every aisle in the store, out the front door and down the block, for over a week. People were asking for forwards on their paychecks, taking out loans, selling cars, anything they could do to get a computer at this magic price point.
The main selling point? It had a modem and people could see what this "internet" business was all about for the first time.
We had a computer at home when I was a kid and in retrospect I was surprised to realize how unusual that was. I imagine it gave me far more advantage than I think.
my dad was taking a CS course starting in 1989 and they still had to send written programs by post mail to Warsaw because it would compile faster and "more accurately". from what he described the professors would do a "code review" but you only passed if it compiled there.
Something that I often find frustrating about modern technology is how little we do with the vast amounts of processing power we have. A lot of what we are doing now - word processing, spreadsheets, email, web browsing - was done by machines with a fraction of the computing power two decades ago. What does it matter if the numbers get bigger if the use cases are the same?
It isn't riveting conversation, just stuff like "Sunset" (to make the lights warmer), "remind me to buy cheese when I get to $GroceryStore", "play $album please", but it adds up.
I also take a lot of pictures, which have become unreasonably good to the point where I'm still learning how to take a better picture with my fancy mirrorless than I can take with my phone. Both of them are computers.
After I take those pictures it does accurate analysis of what's in them, so when I search for cats, or spider, or flowers, it finds them. It does this on the device, which is pretty cool.
I have another computer that flies, I can tell it to fly circles around a target or do a bit of following. It's neither an expensive nor featureful example of its class. It flies for a real 25 minutes on one battery and weighs 249 grams.
There's another one which cleans my floor, to be honest we could have done an okay job of that in the 90s, batteries and chips were almost up to it.
Then there's the one that I can tell to make fantasy dwarves and it just does it. I think that's the one younger me would have been most impressed by.
You couldn't do it at the same time. It's nice to say "we could run a spreadsheet or listen to music", but it's almost like these were mutually exclusive. Winamp was light on resources, but if you went on to try a large-ish sheet on Excel, the music would skip, or the app would crash, or both.
The main amazing draw to Linux in the early days was that you could renice mpg123 just enough to keep audio playing while using the computer for other things.
It could also burn a CD without freezing the system or producing a coaster.
Modern software benefits from increased computational power because it allows new features and speeding up older ones. Sure, “office” apps don’t benefit much, but you’re ignoring many fields where they do benefit.
For example, the field of 3D graphics. Games and animated movies have become a lot more realistic and feature filled thanks to more powerful graphics cards. In fact, Disney specifically puts a lot of effort into making hair realistic. That was impractical a decade ago, and impossible a decade prior.
Meh. Are the stories being created with games getting better? For example, Half Life and Portal are pretty modern and immersive and run on some 20-year-old hardware.
The story lines and the graphics are orthogonal. It’s possible to immersive and fun games with “poor” graphics (Portal) and it’s possible to have bad storylines with amazing graphics.
Even if you’re fond/nostalgic for older hardware and games, that doesn’t mean you can’t recognize that things have improved.
Well if the overarching point is that nowadays we have so much computing power, and it doesn’t really result in better experiences, and that most things one would want to do could’ve been done on much older hardware, then it’s kind of the point that the graphics are orthogonal to a fun gaming experience.
Meh. Are stories being created in books getting better? For example, The Decameron and Canterbury Tales are pretty impressive and were written before the printing press.
You're absolutely right about 3D graphics, but how much time does the average desktop computer user spend rendering hair?
Even if you need bigtime compute power for video games, there are game streaming services where someone else's computer will do that for you.
I have a high-end graphics card and all the processing power I need to play games... but I am still wasting all of that whenever that isn't what I'm doing, aren't I?
I feel that single-threaded processing power stopped increasing at 2 major events in history:
* The arrival of video cards around 1997 (focus shifted from general computation to digital signal processing)
* The arrival of the iPhone around 2007 (focus shifted from performance to power consumption)
I'd vote to undo these setbacks by moving to local data processing, where a large number of cores each have 1/N of the total memory, shared by M memory busses. Memory controllers would manage shuffling data to where it's needed so that the memory appears as 1 contiguous address space to any process.
In other words, this would look identical to the desktop CPUs we have today, just with a large number of cores (over 256) and a memory bandwidth many hundreds or thousands of times faster than what we have now if it uses content-addressable memory with copy-on-write internally. The speed difference is like comparing BitTorrent to FTP, and why GPUs run orders of magnitude faster than CPUs (unfortunately limited to their narrow use cases).
This would let us get back to traditional programming in the language of our choice (perhaps something like Erlang, Go or Octave/MATLAB) rather than shaders.
Apple appears to be trying to do this with their M1 and ideas loosely borrowed from transputers. But since their goals are proprietary, they won't approach anything close to the general computing power available from the transistor count for at least a decade, maybe never.
So there's an opportunity here for someone to reintroduce multicore CPUs and scalable transputers composed of them. Then we could write whatever OpenGL/Vulkan/Metal/TensorFlow libraries we wanted over that, since they are trivial with the right architecture.
This would also allow us to drop async and parallel keywords from our languages and just use higher-order methods which are self-parallelizing. Processing big data would "just work" since Amdahl's law only applies to serial and sequential computation.
The advantages are so numerous that I struggle to understand why things would stay the way they are other than due to the Intel/Nvidia hegemony. And I've felt this way since 1997, back when people thought I was crazy for projecting to the endgame like with any other engineering challenge.
> I'd vote to undo these setbacks by moving to local data processing, where a large number of cores each have 1/N of the total memory, shared by M memory busses. Memory controllers would manage shuffling data to where it's needed so that the memory appears as 1 contiguous address space to any process.
Cheap RAM is DDR. Fast RAM would be on-die but that would be very expansive, or maybe now on package (but with some tech to be developed). But appart from decoupling latencies of accesses, I don't really see the point of having N busses (from local core to its local memory), especially if you need a very large number of cores. More memory channels seems good enough. The bandwidth is already hard to saturate on well-designed SoC like the M1 Pro and above, probably improvement to the latency could yield to better benefits than trying to increase the bandwidth more.
> In other words, this would look identical to the desktop CPUs we have today, just with a large number of cores (over 256) and a memory bandwidth many hundreds or thousands of times faster than what we have now if it uses content-addressable memory with copy-on-write internally. The speed difference is like comparing BitTorrent to FTP, and why GPUs run orders of magnitude faster than CPUs (unfortunately limited to their narrow use cases).
"content-addressable memory with copy-on-write internally" are you describing what caches already kind of do, in a way (esp. if I mix that with: "memory appears as 1 contiguous address space to any process")? The good news would then be: we already have them :)
What remains, that I think I fully understand what you mean, seems to be: more cores. The other good news here is that: it is in progress. If 6 years ago you would have gotten 6 to 8 cores on an enthusiast platform, you would now probably chose 12 to 16 cores on just a basic one (and even more on a modern enthusiast one)
There has been a pause but in recent years but it was basically Intel having process difficulties, and being caught up by the rest of the industry. Including some with power consumption also in mind, and given what an high perf CPU dissipates today, power consumption has also become key to unlock raw performance anyway.
The shift to a focus on power consumption was already happening anyway without the iphone even on desktop. CPUs were already in the nuclear reactor territory as far as being able to produce as much heat per unit area
If developers could trade more resources usage (cpu, memory, storage, network bandwidth) for better developer ux, they would do it in a heartbeat, which is why no matter how much computing power has progressed, most softwares doesn't seem to get any faster and keep using more and more resources. On the plus side, software development is much easier today compared to decades ago.
A lot of what I'm doing now would have been insanely expensive or simply impossible when I was a kid. Just as a for instance, I have a half petabyte of video and music stored on a local server to play over my local network. That half petabyte of storage is fast enough to serve over the local network and cost less than 1/3 the price of 10 megabytes of storage in the advertisements in the article.
The difference is that you can now casually manipulate a spreadsheet of the size that would choke a supercomputer back then … on an iPad.
My watch has orders of magnitude more processing power and working memory than my first PC in the mid 90’s. It weighs maybe 200 grams and runs on battery power for ~20 hours.
We sell entry level computers that choke on small spreadsheets and are less responsive than the same size spreadsheet was 25 years ago on a computer with a thousand times less computing power.
Yes, we can handle much larger data now with proper hardware, however, most people don't do that, their needs for documents and spreadsheets are just the same as it was earlier, but modern systems somehow manage to be worse despite having orders of magnitude more processing power and working memory.
The article focuses almost entirely on hardware especially hardware prices.
Then there's the usual confusion about inflation. In a theoretical sense a $3K hard drive would be like spending $9K now, but with massive economic decline and income inequality the real comparison is in the 80s families could scare up $3K if they really wanted, but now people can only afford $1K phones with exotic high interest rate financing, so people were either three times richer back then or nine times richer back then. Either way times are not good now. The point of an ad for a $3K hard drive from the 80s is not that it would in some theoretical sense cost $9K now or would store a million times as much data now, but that short decades ago people could afford to spend $3K and now they're stressed at spending merely $300. Another few decades of permanent economic decline and we as a people will be stressed at spending only $30.
Most of the consumer-level ads try to link their product with success and intelligence, whereas all advertisements now focus on competitively showing off your former wealth or some variation on "We are woke so our products must be good" LOL. Tech ads in 2022 look a lot more like mechanical gold watch ads in the 70s or designer jeans ads from the 80s.
The other point missed in the article is computer mags from my youth were absolutely chock full of software advertisements for $1000 compilers and $500 word processor and spreadsheet software. When I was a little kid a nice C compiler cost about half my dad's car, then as a teen you could get a decent K+R compatible compiler for a hundred bucks from radio shack (I paid 50 on sale using money I saved) and as a young adult, development tools are all free and you download linux and emacs and start writing code for the cost of some bbs download time, and later internet download time. Most of the software that we take for granted as being free today in 2022 used to sell for at least hundreds of dollars in the 80s and at least $50 in the early 90s, then the internet hit and you just download gcc "for free".
What I remember of those early computer ads is they showed a smiling family
all gathered around a computer, joining in with some wholesome activity.
Firstly, that never happened. The moment my ZX81 came into our house
there were nightly fights for the television (early computers needed
the telly as a display). The computer completely alienated my parents
and siblings who were mainly grateful that my interest in electronics
and hacking was a pacifier.
Secondly, the distance between those images of technology as a
connecting force and today's reality could hardly be more
striking. Personal computers are objects of radical individualism.
Four member of the family each staring into their own 6 inch digital
world, face lit from below in blueish light would be the right image.
So the question of "how far we've come" is more nuanced than kilobytes
of RAM and megahertz of processing power.
Coincidentally I just watched a 90 second clip from The Brady Bunch. I’d forgotten how formally everyone dressed on TV … even in their own homes with no guests visiting. The father is wearing slacks and a tie. The girls wear dresses. Not realistic.
Not going to make an argument for the realism of The Brady Bunch, but people did certainly dress more formally in previous decades.
At my first job bagging groceries and stocking shelves, we wore a dress shirt and a tie.
At my first corporate software job, it was only a year or two past the time they had to wear a suit and tie to work. By the end of the 90's people went to work at a corporate job dressed the way I dressed at the beginning of the 90's to go skateboarding.
Depending on, for lack of a better word, class people did dress up more in general. My father didn't have a tie on at home. But we did dress up way more than today when we went out--and especially if we were traveling by air or going to a restaurant.
In business, I was just joking the other week that, in the course of my career, we've gone from business suits being the expected attire at industry events to jeans with T-shirts at least being perfectly acceptable.
One of my earlier memories was sitting on my Dad's lap playing some Infocom game on his brand-new PC-AT. I didn't get to go into the study that much so it was big deal.
I still have the F series keyboard from that computer, which ended up housing my first three motherboards as well.
> sitting on my Dad's lap playing some Infocom game
That's heartening. I'm also trying to do a good job as a dad, letting
my daughter have positive experiences with computers, to learn to have
fun, respect but also command them, to be in control.
I wish more computer games had “helper” functionality like super Mario galaxy did - perfect to let kids help without having to be able to play the whole game.
My mid-80s starting salary out of college with a BA was $25K - pretty good at the time and order $70K today. That $3K in the 80s would be 1/8th of my annual salary. Most people would consider that a very large expenditure and not something they could find digging under the couch cushions and breaking piggy banks.
I don't disagree with any of that, none the less, they were selling at $3K then and have to cut price to $300 to sell now, so people are obviously 10x poorer now than in the 80s. Can't argue with actual historical economic activity.
Its worth pointing out that I was paying something ridiculous like $115 for health insurance around 1990 and its running about $1750 now for my wife and I, and that's with horrifying copays and stuff. Somebody with $70K is still getting $70K, they're just spending it on rent and medical expenses now instead of $3K hard drives.
On one hand, instead of life involving $3K hard drives, now we supposedly have better medical care and nicer houses. On the other hand, its not like lifespans are increasing, LOL.
The sort of person that could afford to plonk $3k a few megabytes of storage without thinking about it too hard back then wasn't the sort of person that needs a payment plan to afford an iPhone today, it's the sort of person who's never needed to save for a new car.
Eh, your economics have some issues here. Back then people were extremely stressed about spending that much. At least where I lived people could not spend that much, and a lot of computers that were bought were with financing.
On of the big things that has changed is the massive increase in housing costs and rents causing all kinds of economic issues.
It sounds like we're roughly the same age, so I won't go completely into "get off my lawn" mode. But most families in the 80s could not scare up $3K easily, it was a boatload of money; and if they could, it was for emergencies.
It's easy to remember our youth, and think of how easy it was. And it may have been for us (well, I was working or in college most of the 80s), but not our parents who foot the bills.
The oldest and most mind-boggling process ever devised and foisted upon readers lies at the bottom of many of those ads -- "circle ### on reader service card."
It was a cruel joke for the ad to spark your interest whereby you would circle the number, mail in the bingo card to the publisher (3-5 days), whose lead management group would process it (3-5 days), then send the lead to the company or dealer (3-5 days), who would assign it to a sales rep (3-5 days), who was working their leads and getting back to potential customers (3-5 days), who would then ignore the call because they had lost interest in the product or couldn't remember requesting information.
Compare that with today where making a phone call to the sales team takes too long (3-5 minutes) and it's easier to just go get the damn information yourself.
Those ads really take me back. I had a college friend tell me in 1974 that everyone would have a computer on their desk by 1984. We ruthlessly mocked him for it. But in 1983 I got a computer on my desk at the fertilizer plant. There was zero software for the fertilizer industry at the time. So I started with Lotus 123 and taught myself the macro language and set out to create it.
Then I convinced my boss to buy me a copy of dBase II and set out to learn that as well. I was spending every work night until 11 pm. Got tired of that so I withdrew $3500 out of my meager savings and bought an IBM XT clone from a new company in Flint. I remember adding a modem so that I could explore CompuServe, a large mainframe based online service by H & R Block.
I miss those days. I feel like back then computers naturally encouraged exploration and learning. There was no internet, or even modems in most cases, so there was no alternative but exploration - trying to figure out what all you could do with this strange piece of hardware.
I'm not entirely sure I'm just jaded by time - I feel like maybe computers became commodity appliances, for an entirely different crowd, but I stayed the same.
I grew up with a Mac so my experience was a little different, but I’m amazed at people who’s first experience sitting down at a computer was starting at an unforgiving blinking cursor.
This article makes me nostalgic. Sometime in 1994 or 1995, my immigrant dad bought us a Packard Bell machine. He couldn’t afford it, and I’m not sure what drove him to make the purchase. I do know he used a credit card, couldn’t make the payments, and it was one of a few purchases that destroyed his credit.
This thing sat in its cardboard packaging for at least 6-9 months. My dad had no idea how to set it up, and his English wasn’t good enough to just read the manual I guess. When I was in first grade, one of my dads friends came over and helped my dad set it up. They installed AOL. My dad gave my older sibling the password but wouldn’t share tell me.
The first time I used the computer, I spent a good hour I think staring at Mighty Morphin Power Rangers content on the “Kids Only” AOL channel.
This literally changed my life. I learned HTML when I was in the 3rd grade. The next year, I learned PHP because all of the cool Quake 3 clans had web pages where you could post updates without having to change HTML and re upload files over FTP. By 5th grade, all the cool people on IRC (Dalnet or EFNet I think) were talking about object oriented PHP.
I learned how to write objects in PHP, although OOP didn’t really make sense to me. I remember using some library to add my Quake 3 clan’s logo as a watermark on images I would upload to our website.
As a kid growing up in the 1990s with both of my parents being alive then, it was truly a different time. I believed I could accomplish just about anything. By 1999/2000, I knew I’d wanted to do something with computers when I grew up. By 2001/2002, I was poking around in Java a bit. Unfortunately I didn’t really learn much computer science until college. And I didn’t really appreciate data structures and design until really starting my career.
Sometimes I do wonder how things could have been different if I was born in the 70s or 80s.
Maybe the main difference for me, as a 1970s-80s kid, was that I taught myself some small bits of assembly language programming.
I feel very fortunate to have come along at a time where home computers were simple enough to understand.
The circuits were literally black boxes, so no doubt the real old-timers would chuckle at this assertion: they had to build the computers out of discrete electrical components, one transistor at a time... But I could understand a CPU that had a single register, an "accumulator"...
Who still has their first computer? My TRS-80 Color Computer 2 is sitting quietly in my garage, in a box that contains it, the TV adapter, the Color Basic manuals, a Radio Shack joystick and a half dozen cassette tapes with programs I wrote as an 10yo in 1982.
If anyone at the Computer History Museum reads this: Get the 70s/80s micro computers out from behind the display cases!!! CHM has at least one of every computer you can think of, why not take the extras and put them on the floor for visitors to play with? It's like torture wandering through the displays and not being able to play with all those computers and video games you lusted over as a kid.
I have a couple TI-994a's and a C64 out in the garage that were given to me as gifts... not the original (that died a long time ago).
I learned to program on the TI, TI-BASIC first, then Extended Basic, then some Assembler. The C64 was great because you had to understand how to work directly with hardware. On the TI, you would nice library call like CALL SOUND. On the C64 you'd have to POKE everything to the correct address to coax sound out of it (often what you would do in a single line on the TI would take 4-5 lines on the C64, but the C64 was fast, and had lots of memory). Good times.
My Atari 800 died in a lightning storm in 1983, but I still have the replacement 800XL downstairs, with floppy drives, cassette drive, thermal printer, and 300 baud modem. An Ape Face paralell port adapeer for the Epson RX-80, which I don't have anymore. Lots of floppies and cartridges, too. And JForth along with the manual.
We still have my wife's first computer (Sinclair ZX81, she was the first kid in school to have their own computer), and my second (Amstrad CPC6128 & colour monitor).
I still have my first keyboard, an IBM Model F. The PC-AT which went with it was Ship of Theseuse'd into the late 486 era, I abandoned it when tower cases became standard.
Victor Borge in his later years here in the Verbatim ad, was a European keyboard virtuoso who made his way in the US by adding a distinctive comedy element to his solo touring performances.
So it's only approprate to have him as a spokesman sitting at a computer keyboard, with his document looking not much different than sheet music. And he looks like he is tickling the ivories there, sticking mainly to the black keys I see.
Maybe a bit like Irving Berlin, who was the most popular songwriter for so many decades, and who only played on the black keys.
Interestingly, Berlin's personal Steinway is now in the Smithsonian since it is a one-of-a-kind chromatic piano where he could mechanically shift the musical key the black keys were tuned for.
So he could get together with artists like Sinatra and play his tunes as originally written but in the singers' preferred key.
Now Borge was actually quite improvisational for a clasical musician.
He could get up there, introduce himself and play a number of 30 to 60 second interludes, and get away with saying or merely acting like he hadn't made his mind up what full piece to play.
Then there could be a little monologue for a while which was one good reason so many were there to see him, but regardless of how excellent that was, the elephant in the room since the beginning had always been the significant percentage of the crowd who wanted nothing but the music.
Zappa had this too.
Borge would flip up his coat-tails, move closer to the microphone and say in his European accent "Do you want to hear Great Music? Classics?"
He then quickly extends his arms in the characteristic way for more freedom of movement, puts his hands on the keys, moves closer to the microphone again and says "Too bad!"
I got into computers in high school around 1980. I used to read Byte magazine and studied every ad. So exciting! My senior year, after saving and saving my income from my $2.85/hour after school job I bought an Apple ][+ for around $2000.
The craziest thing about Byte Magazine was that it was published in Peterborough, NH. I was friends with the editor's son in the early 90s... If you've ever been to that area of NH, you'd be amazed that a high tech magazine of Byte's stature was published there. I'd be surprised if the town even had decent broadband before the 2000s. Physically and culturally, it's about as far away from Silicon Valley (where I live now) as you can get.
As to how far we have progressed, I'd rather see us talk about how we interact with technology and how it changes our lives.
Smart phones are powerful computers. They are ubiquitous. They're the computers we all have now. What have they accomplished? I can always contact someone, though loneliness seems to have increased. People can also contact me all the time, sometimes with video. Nobody wears watches because they carry phones, so we missed the Dick Tracy future. Nobody can be lost anymore because they (and many other entities) always know where on earth they are. All of those things are absent from the old ads.
Our "progress" is mostly about surveillance whereas the old ads were all about what individuals could accomplish. And there's definitely progress in how things are marketed to us. Aren't those old ads clunky?
"By the time the 1980s came to an end, it was unusual for a household to be without a personal computer."
As someone who graduated college when the 1980s came to an end, I can say it was unusual for a household to HAVE a computer. They were a major purchase, any communication with the outside world was via dial-up modem to a BBS, and most families had no practical reason for them.
That was my little boy dream, to play the Bird vs Magic basketball video game. I had an Atari 2600 back then and was buying used computer magazine and when that was released it looked amazing compared to the stick figure basketball on the 2600
When I think about how freeing having a personal computer was back then, and then think about how computing devices are used now to track people, control speech, and generally keep people in line - I don't think of progress.
I always feel amazed when I see a large micro-SD card (1TB for example) and compare it to my Atari 800 which had three 16k ram cartridges, each larger than an iPhone Max. So this micro-SD card the size of my thumbnail is 67 million times the memory of one of those cartridges.
And one SD card could probably hold every commercially released title for every machine ever released combined up until about the CD era started in the 90s.
Involved in the industry since 1980, I am intrigued looking back how we just reinvent the same things but with different distractions - I'm thinking of things like the "natural language" program Savvy from Excalibur Technologies running on an Apple II with a CPM card back in 1982 (which I cannot even find referenced online), then the whole computer world got thoroughly distracted with the graphical user interface for a few decades (macOS, Windows) but with applications that hardly even matched the capability of Savvy. Savvy and programs with that level of functionality simply disappeared. Then the world got distracted with smart phones (iOS, Android), with apps really nothing more than portals through to large datacenter applications still with capabilities that hardly matched the capability of Savvy. I guess in a few decades we'll be distracted with Ray Kurzweil-esque red blood cell sized computers swimming in our blood (still with capabilities that will hardly match the capabilities of Savvy). It's as if humans really do not want functionality and capability as much as we want accessibility?
Pipes (the tobacco kind, not the Unix kind) used to be a lot more popular back then.
Edit: Dr. Dobb's review at https://archive.org/details/1985-03-dr-dobbs-journal/page/11... . Says SAVVY PC was written in MMS Forth "this despite John Dvorak's statment in his InfoWorld column, "Inside Track," that no decent program was ever written in Forth". :)
I was co-owner of an Apple dealership in Wellington, New Zealand. We used and sold Savvy, which was touted as a "natural language processor" - seemed to be a database with a natural language query system that was dumb as could be to begin with but rapidly gained in intelligence the more it was used. After the Mac was released the spotlight went off Savvy and a lot of my old customers told me their product was purchased back (recalled?) by Excaliber. There are references here that it may have ended up at Sandia Labs. Did it become a national security item? Does that happen?
Yes and no. Big wins include the fact that smoking isn't everywhere the way it used to be, gay marriage and rights, more freedom for women, and generally lower costs for essential - albeit with some serious downsides for those involved in making and distributing them.
Losses include much less economic headroom for everyone who isn't upper middle class or higher, with a fair percentage of the population falling out at the low end, much more homelessness, and a cutthroat nickel and dime everything neoliberal culture in business. So while computers and cars are cheaper, health care and college expenses are much higher.
There was still some lingering benign paternalism in business in the 80s and especially the 70s, but that's much rarer now.
And serious stressors like climate catastrophe are much more imminent.
> So while computers and cars are cheaper, health care and college expenses are much higher.
Technology, transportation, and food are cheaper.
Unfortunately major essentials such as housing, health care, and education are drastically more expensive.
Outside of cartels and rent-seekers, I can't imagine people saying "you know, we really need to make housing, health care, and education unaffordable for more people."
It's particularly disappointing that technology doesn't seem to have reduced the cost of health care or education - the cartels seem to have won by restricting supply and exploiting indirect payment systems.
That’s a good summary. One nit: are cars really cheaper now? I don’t get that impression. They are definitely more reliable, though, and last much longer.
all i see is diminishing returns, marketing and fantasies.
4MB used to make people believe they'd do everything for life, accounting, programming, graphics whatever. It was infinite joy with only 320x200 points.
Now you sell a 4k capable pocket datacenter running on 5W and people are barely satisfied for a year.
Imagine never having sweets in your life, then the first time you having a peppermint your life would be changed.
Now imagine a long life where you had all the sweets you could ever eat available all the time. Your attitude to them is going to be far different.
In addition, back in the 90s computers were going to attract 'computer people' and the rest would ignore them. Now they are just a fact of life, even for the disinterested.
TBF the pocket datacenter does way more than a vintage does though. However I do agree there is an inflation of customer expectation since the 90s.
Just imagine: assuming tech evolves a lot slower. What would happen? People would still be OK, games would still be fun, business would carry on regardless.
Hell yes! Back then here in the USA we had only 2 sexes, 3 TV networks, and all libraries had were these printed website things they called “books”.
Nowadays we have 57 sexes, 570 TV networks, and libraries in the city have evolved to their true purpose of sheltering the unhoused. And soon we won’t be burdened by our privacy belongings!
The optimism around computers in the 1980s is a noteworthy juxtaposition with that site itself. Given the impressively large number of different commercial surveillance companies to which that site is selling out everyone.
Pixel art actually displayed nicer on CRT monitors, and DOS interfaces were pretty fast and keyboard optimized, and there wasn't an industry dedicated to spying on you. So not always for the better.
I remember many of those ads from when they appeared!
I like that the author showed a lot of ads with girls operating the computer. Typically it was boys (or whatever) with his sister just passively standing by. Of course it was the 80s and apparently it was quite common for the “family computer” to be installed in the son’s room.
TBH my favorite part was being reminded of the absurd clothing people wore in those days and the incredible clutter of stuff people had everywhere.
For business printing the standard was the daisy wheel - which was insanely loud and sounded like a machine gun.
Between 2X and 6X as expensive as a dot matrix. So around $2k for a mid-price model and $4k for a faster and more reliable model at the high end.
Dot matrix printers were relatively affordable. But still expensive. Maybe $300 for a budget model, up to a few k for a high end model with a 132 chars and a double density print head.
Adjusted prices are roughly 2.7X. So almost $800 for a basic dot matrix, up to a ballpark $10k for a high end printer.
Just for printing.
Compare with today where a mono laser costs ~$150 for a basic model, $300-$600 for added scanning and copying, and $400-$800 for a colour laser with extra features.
Thanks for this. I was fortunate to have an Epson FX-80 dot matrix printer in 1983. My father bought it for me. I had no idea they were so expensive - at least $1500 in todays dollars (I could only find the price of the MX-80 in 1983, not the FX-80 which was even more expensive).
I wish my father was alive for me to thank him yet again for this marvelous gift that must have put him out quite a bit.
A modern HDD is 15-30 million times cheaper per byte than that 10mb “hard disk you’ve been waiting for” ad according to diskprices.com. What will get 30 million times better in the future vs. what is tapped out?
If you adjust for inflation assuming the year was 1980, the drive would cost $12,000 in today’s dollars. So today’s drives are over 800 million times cheaper. Plus lighter and way faster I’m sure. So more than 1B times better, easily, with 42 years of progress.
Now you could argue that there’s less space on a modern drive, given how file sizes increased. Even 5MB was massive then, with mostly text files.
I still recall when I had to upgrade from MS Word 4.x/Mac, which did still fit on a single floppy (together with a basic OS), to MS Word 5.x/Mac, which was more then 5MB, on an MPB 100 with a 20MB disk: I had to dump half of the installed applications most of the data in order for Word to fit. Soon, HDs increased to 10 times the size to keep up with this, but soon enough, 220MB was less than that 20MB had been before. Same with GB-drives, and so on. If you want to transpile a simple text file of a few lines into another simple text file, you may need an entire drive for dependencies…
To my own observations, drive sizes always stayed about the same in relation to what you could put onto them. But, at the same time, requirements for temporary storage are steadily increasing, which may provide you with even less usable space.
As for price, yes, economies of scale. If you’re selling billions and billions of drives, you may do things that were unthinkable, when the total number of sales was still in the 100Ks, at a fraction of the cost.
You are right the more space we have the more we dream up ways to use it. However I wouldn't go as far to say "drive sizes always stayed about the same in relation to what you could put onto them". People still store text but it's now basically free. Images and audio are heading towards free. Videos still add up. You specifically call out executable programs which I agree have grown in size very rapidly. So I think it depends on what you are putting on the drive. I wouldn't say all space gains have been eaten up by bigger files.
I honestly think nothing has really changed. You can see SCO saying "We have graphics now! People will want to use Unix on the desktop now" all the way back in the 80s. Computers keep getting bigger but the software keeps up with it. All that's really changed is that we have more computers since the smallest ones are so cheap, even so we had cheap MCUs back then.
Brings back so many memories. Back then getting new stuff would save you money, but now things are going in opposite direction for some use cases. Supply chain has eliminated some new products such as Raspberry PIs. I have instead been buying up broken screen laptops for about $50 to get better powered mini servers.
It’s all relative. My first hard drive was a Seagate ST-251 40 MB MFM hard drive on my 10 MHz Intel 8088 CPU. It cost about $300 at the time and perpetually remained about 80% full.
The last hard drive I bought was a Seagate Exos X18 18 TB Sata hard drive on my 3.6 GHz AMD Ryzen 7 3700X CPU. It cost about $300 and has perpetually remained about 80% full.
My first hard drive was a PCs Limited (now known as Dell) "drive on a card" which was a competitor to the higher-priced 20MB HardCard (brand name as I recall). I'd have to go to another computer to try looking up the purchase price.
There were hard drives mounted directly on an interface card, they would take up two slots, when five available slots max was pretty much standard.
I remember buying an external 5GB hard drive for $4,999 with the first ProTools system back in 1991 (which itself cost much more than that). I was more amazed at having that much capacity than I am now buying yet another 4TB drive from Walmart for less than $100.
Well, two things haven't changed. The first is the ad, "you always find something in the last place you look, but a computer has 20000 places." The other is the need for a cup of coffee and a sandwich if you're really going to get down to some serious computing.
Tangential rant: Why are so many sites these days so Google-centric? All the world isn't a modern computer and/or running Chrome. webp is not a universal standard yet.
Are hosting services that allow serving different files based on user agent really that hard to find? Or has everyone just drank the Google Flavor Aid?
It's a standard, but it isn't a universal standard. Know the difference.
Until a standard has both been accepted by a significant majority, and there has been plenty of time for the standard to be adopted, it's bad to simply turn on a feature and say, "screw you" to everyone who has an older device or computer that can't run the latest software.
Serving different files to different user agents is not desirable, sure, but it's better than this crap - have the latest or it doesn't work. You know this, I think.
So is it that people are shitty and elitist, or is that people are just ignorant? If the former, then we can't change that - people will be shitty if they choose to be shitty. Sounds like you advocate for that.
If people are just ignorant about the fact that their web site doesn't work on older phones, tablets, Macs, or older non-Chrome browsers, then they should be told.
It isn't just the Chromium monoculture that supports WebP, though. Firefox and Safari both do too. What other browsers do you want to support it before you'll consider it universal?
And for people with operating systems too old to run any browser version that supports WebP, they're also way behind on security updates, so we should be encouraging them to upgrade to a newer OS.
I first started working in web development in 2005. We had Pentium 4 servers, running at what would probably feel like 1ghz today (P4 had some pipeline problems), with probably a gig or 2 of RAM, on-prem. Core count? No idea. I'm guessing 4 at the most, but it might have only been 2. We usually ran two servers, one for app server and one for databases, though there were frequently multiple apps and multiple databases on those servers. Such a machine probably cost around $3k at the time, (IDK, I'm just guessing. Also, inflation has been about 50% since then). Most of that cost was probably in disk arrays. I was working on GIS apps, so we had "a lot" of data at rest.
We had dedicated DBAs and sys admins. Most of the difficulty in getting applications built was A) being young and not knowing what I was doing, B) communicating and getting approved configuration changes with the sys admins for whatever stupid thing we were being asked to do by bizdev, C) communicating and getting approved scheme changes in the database with the DBAs without having a local copy we could modify at will to test anything before going to staging.
Today, I have my servers in the cloud. I'm given 2 cores at 1ghz with like 4gb of RAM. It's about $2k a year. Every year. Or in that ballpark. It's not a huge diff from 17 years ago.
My laptop has 14 cores running at atleast 3.5ghz, with 64gb of RAM. Plus a massive GPU. It also cost about $2k. I work in VR so I spend that every two years.
The server backends I build now are not significantly different than I ever did. The front ends are significantly more complex (I thought I was pretty hot shit making a 2D graphics API in JS out of absolutely positioned DIVs as "pixels" back then, before Canvas was a thing, and now I do full motion 3D in VR at 120hz).
So IDK. I probably got some minor details wrong, I'm not going to look absolutely everything up. Take it for a rough approximation.
One thing that strikes me is that, operationally, things are vastly different, but not necessarily easier. I don't have to get anyone to approve anything anymore, but that's mostly because I'm the one in charge now and I know what I'm doing now. Front end tooling has improved thanks to TypeScript, but that's also come with massive amounts of other complications because it still needs to be JS at the end of the day. NPM has made it easier to get and manage dependencies, but the creaking tower of transpilers and bundling tools has clawed a lot of those gains back.
I used to be able to clone a repo, start visual studio, hit F5, and after about 45s for a full, first time rebuild, I'd be in the app. Now I need to restore dependencies, make sure all the build tools are at the right versions, make sure all the separate build tools are running in the right order and time. Sometimes it doesn't work, because it's not clear why TypeScript is using VS' outdated lib.d.ts files that install by default instead of the ones that are in my node_modules.
It "works", but it's deeply dissatisfying. I can never tell if introducing a new project into the repo is going to break first-time setup. I'm able to do more on the project I have already setup, but seeing up new projects has gotten so difficult that I often find myself so mentally overwhelmed (disgust, avoidance, etc) that I just don't, I go back to working on the one project instead of trying something new.
Don't know where I'm going with this, but there it be.
It was. At the time (31 years ago) I was the magician in my office because I was, somehow, able to find any file on our Novell file server via a content search-- no matter what program originated it.
These ads show not only how much we progressed in terms of technology but also as being a society with less prejudice and misogyny. Take a look at the role of women on those photos. Disgusting!
Women showing their kids new tech, truly disgusting.
I was actually surprised there were only two photos of "pinup" type girls... and then shortly later, a photo of a naked dude! And then a businesswoman "walking into the light" carrying a PC! I guess I was expecting much worse.
Yes, there are those exceptions. In most cases the woman is shown as someone whose only function is to take care of the kids while the man is the one with the job to take care of the family; the first picture shows exactly that.
The photo of the naked dude is not exploiting his appearance. The photo of the business woman may be interpreted as something like "even a woman can carry it."
I mean, I guess that's the entire point of the second one's message, but IBM seems to have been pretty consistent with the diversity around then.
--
Edit: The collection behind that last one (https://digital.hagley.org/2018222) is full of short documentaries about employment that are similarly interesting, e.g.:
That's what I find striking too. Likewise there's precisely one photo in the entire collection showing a non-white face (and it's a school room of kids, not "customers"). I remember reading these ads; it wasn't that long ago at all.
I visited an indoor mall recently, in an area with some of the whitest demographics in the nation, but also (since I know the stereotypes about fat Americans) the healthiest.
Almost without exception, the models depicted in the store window ads were obese women of color. Even for athletic wear.
Whatever weird fetishism the marketing world has going on now, it’s absolutely not representative relative to local demographics, nor nation-wide demographics.
> Almost without exception, the models depicted in the store window ads were obese women of color.
Obviously I can't speak to whatever local ads you saw, but I don't believe the "almost without exception" for an instant. Here's the front page of Forever 21, sort of a reasonable approximation to an "indoor mall" environment: https://www.forever21.com/
Out of 55 models with faces that I see, 27 are white (or at least plausibly white-presenting, obviously there's some ambiguity here as there always is with any kind of ethnic definition).
So... 50% almost exactly. A bit lower than the population at large (though probably much closer to the younger/urban target market). Hardly a lack of representation, which is what you claim to be seeing. But my guess is that absent these numbers, you'd look at that page and think "almost without exception..." right?
>Here's the front page of Forever 21, sort of a reasonable approximation to an "indoor mall" environment: https://www.forever21.com/
sort of, but not quite
even in my 99% indigenous European country, I'm seeing the same trend with the fancy brand ads in our malls - 50/50 or so with women models, 90% with men
I do realize of course the reason is that nobody bothers localizing these ads for our tiny market, but still, these ads don't reflect the demographics of the largest market either
it doesn't bother me though. if anything, not being the target demographic for 500$ shoes made by SEA child slaves is a badge of honor
No, that looks relatively representative to me, modulo minor variance, and even the “plus sized” models aren’t on the extreme end of obesity.
I’m even impressed that there’s asian representation; they’re generally grossly under-represented.
(Also, I feel like I’ve been trolled into looking at Forever 21’s website).
You don’t have to believe me, but I’m also not going to go through the mall recording exactly what percentage of stores featured extremely obese women of color as their front-and-center spokesmodel.
The US non-hispanic white population is about 60%. I'd be absolutely stunned if there was a study somewhere showing white representation in a reasonably defined advertising market under that number. Is that really a serious opinion you've formed? I have to wonder where it came from?
We were incredibly poor, so my mother nearly killed him, but he insisted that personal computers were here to stay, and that his children needed to become acquainted.
Nearly 40 years later, he was right. I have made, and continue to make, a great living on these crazy machines.