Computing from 1976 - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

30 Dec 2017

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 at 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/