so if you bought the altair and put it away you could sort of sell it for the same amount of money-worth today. In a message dated 12/30/2017 5:10:22 P.M. US Mountain Standard Time, cctalk@classiccmp.org writes:
It was thus said that the Great Fred Cisin via cctalk once stated: > On Sat, 30 Dec 2017, Murray McCullough via cctalk wrote: > >I was perusing my old computer magazine collection the other day and > >came across an article entitled: “Fast-Growing new hobby, Real > >Computers you assemble yourself”, Dec. 1976. It was about MITS, > >Sphere, IMSAI and SWT. 4K memory was $500. Yikes! Even more here in > >Canada. Now this is true Classic Computing. Have a Happy New Year > >everyone. May the computing gods shine down on us all in 2018. > >Happy computing. Murray :) > > OK, a little arithmetic exercise for you. > (a 16C is nice for this, but hardly necessary) Sounds like fun. > "Moore's Law", which was a prediction, not a "LAW", has often been > mis-stated as predicting a doubling of speed/capacity every 18 months. > > 1) Figure out how many 18 month invtervals since then, and what 4k > "should' have morphed into by now. 1) 28 doublings since 1975. (2017-1975) * 12 ---------------- 18 4K should (had we truly doubed everything every 18 months) now be 1T (terrabyte): 2^12 = 4K 2^(12+28) 2^40 ~ 1T > 2) What did Gordon Moore actually say in 1965? That the number of transistors in an integrated circuit double every 18 months. > 3) How much is $500 of 1976 money worth now? It depends upon how you calculate it. I'm using this page [1] for the calculation, and I get: Current data is only available till 2016. In 2016, the relative price worth of $500.00 from 1976 is: $2,110.00 using the Consumer Price Index $1,680.00 using the GDP deflator $2,400.00 using the value of consumer bundle $2,000.00 using the unskilled wage $2,450.00 using the Production Worker Compensation $3,340.00 using the nominal GDP per capita $4,960.00 using the relative share of GDP > 4) Consider how long it took to use a text editor to make a grocery > shopping list in 1976. How long does it take today? I would think the same amount of time. Typing is typing. > Does having the grocery list consist of pictures instead of words, with > audio commentary, and maybe Smell-O-Vision (coming soon), improve the > quality of life? For me, not really. > How much does it help to be able to contact your > refrigeratior and query its knowledge of its contents? It could be helpful, but with the current state of IoT, I would not want to have that ability. > (Keep in mind, that although hardware expanded exponentially, according to > Moore's Law, Software follows a corollary of Boyle's Law, and expands to > fill the available space and use all of the available resources - how much > can "modern" software do in 4K?, and how much is needed to boot the > computer and run a "modern" text editor?) EMACS is lean and mean compared to some of the "text editors" coming out today, based upon Javascript frameworks. It's scary. > 5) What percentage of computer users still build from kits, or from > scratch? I would say significantly less than 1%. Say, 5% of 1%? That's probably in the right ballpark. > 6) What has replaced magazines for keeping in touch with the current > state of computers? The world wide web, although I do miss the Byte magazine of the 70s and 80s. Not so much the 90s. -spc (Yeah, I realize these were probably rhetorical in nature ... ) [1] http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/
