Friday, June 15, 2012

Movie: M:I-3

It's an action movie. Big budget. No complaints.

Oh, and it has a passing resemblance to a 1960's hit TV show.

Observation: How Much Computer for $2400

In 1981 we paid $2400 for an IBM PC with specs 0.0047GHz CPU, 0.000016GB RAM, audio tape storage (no floppy drive, hard drive unheard of, flash storage unimaginable), 320x200 graphics, and no monitor. We upgraded storage to 0.00016GB floppies soon after.

31 years later people are whining about the expense of $2400 for a descendant computer sporting 489x faster clock speed (x4, it's a quad-core)(never mind how much more done per clock cycle), 1,000,000x the RAM, 1,600,000x the upgraded storage, 81x the pixels, 65,535x the colors, monitor, and similar connectivity improvements - all in a box the volume of the first computer's keyboard.

If you take inflation into account, the cost of that original PC equates to 2.5 "retina" MacBook Pros today. For a third of the work you get a million times the computer.