11 Feb
2010
11 Feb
'10
12:04 p.m.
On 2/11/10, Richard <legalize at xmission.com> wrote:
Interesting to note. It was expensive then, and by extension,
absurdly expensive now. I routinely install enterprise-grade web
servers that are well under $10K (dual-socket, quad core, 48GB of
memory, 1TB internal RAID, quad gigabit NICs, etc).
Ethan Dicks wrote:
> For comparison, a "standard package" color IBM PC/AT (5170)
> ... was $5K at launch in 1985, IIRC.
$5,000 in 1985 is the equivalent of $9876.79 in 2008.[*] I know we all realize that inflation is eating away at
the value of
currency, but it really has picked up quite a bit in the last decade
such that even 1985 currency is quite different from today.
Fortunately for me, I'm making more than twice as many absolute
dollars as I was in 1985 (when I happened to be in college but also
had a part-time, but "real", job as an electronics tech, software
developer, and VMS System Manager), so economically, at least, I've
made some progress over the past 25 years. ;-)
That just floors me because in 1986 I took out a
$4,000 loan to get an
Amiga 1000 with dual flopppy drives and a monitor. (I also got the extra
CHIP ram expansion thingy on the front.)
I also bought an A1000 in 1986. Mine didn't require a loan, but
that's because I got a bare-bones 256K A1000 with no monitor, single
floppy, just mouse and keyboard, for about $800. I later purchased a
Skyles Electric Works CHIP RAM expansion board for under $50, IIRC
(that's still on the machine!) I repurposed a Commodore 1702 monitor
from my C-64, and eventually slapped in a $50
after-market RGBI
interface that I hacked to do analog RGB - still a bit fuzzy owing
to
the limited video bandwidth of the original product, but *much*
cheaper than the going rate for a "proper" analog RBG monitor.
Unfortunately for me, that monitor was stolen in a burglary in 1990,
along with an A500, and a "Wedge" ISA disk interface (fortunately for
me, they dumped the A1000 on the floor but didn't take it with them).
I did happen to get that A1000 while I worked at the aforementioned
job, and am proud that the warranty was voided before the computer
even made it home. We were doing MC68000 embedded product development
there, so there was no way I could help cracking the Amiga case and
showing off the innards to our engineers, which started a session
comparing the guts of the Amiga to our own 68K designs. I still have
one of those boxes that was under development at the time - about the
size of an A2000, able to be stuffed with 2MB of 41256s, and with
enough proprietary slots to support 32 serial ports. It even had an
early-model 3.5" disk drive. No custom chips, though, so very
different from the Amiga once you got outside of the CPU/memory area.
-ethan