Nelis Corbin sent the following email:
“I was browsing
through my old hard drive the other day and stumbled
on an Excel file I use to use to list computer parts
for systems I would build for people. It was more of
just a price listing. Anyway it, it was last edited
on 9/24/04. So I thought it would be interesting to
see what todays prices/parts would go for. I thought
the results were quite interesting (notice the PC
case). Perhaps others would reminisce of the past.”
Price decreases over the past 18 months for memory and DVDs has been nothing short of remarkable – about 50% less. Looking at this made me think of costs when I first started to buy components back in the dark ages – some examples:
- Western Digital Caviar 2G – $250
- 64 MB SDRAM – $300
- 16 MB Pen Drive – $70
- CD ROM reader – $100
These were the days when power supplies were about 200 watts – and that was a big one. Off the shelf PCs cost over $1,000+ for 8086 based systems with 10 – 20 MB hard drives – and that was considered a lot of storage (remember Windows 3.0?).
Plummeting technology costs has pushed computing power deeper into our lives – look around the house and you will see many “smart” appliances, such as a rice cooker that monitors temps and liquids to adjust cooking times so that it cooks rice to exactly the same consistency every time, or a smart thermostat that figures out how long it will take to get to a certain temperature at a certain time and fires up the furnace accordingly.
I don’t have anything profound to say – I just marvel at where we are and where we’re going.
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