Comments on: Billions and Billions Served

By: coffeeguy

coffeeguy — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 19:14:08 +0000

This is such a funny article. To think about where we have come from and where we are going. Clearly Moore is correct in his law that technology doubles every five years. A little response to Feld, it didn't help that rates were at 1% for such along time washing this country out in cash.

By: Brad Feld

Brad Feld — Fri, 02 May 2008 06:10:46 +0000

Are you suggesting ($3500 in 1989; $7000 in today's dollars) that there has been some inflation in the past 20 years? I thought the Fed had taken care of this little issue.

By: fronesis

fronesis — Fri, 02 May 2008 02:06:02 +0000

I think both the SE and the SE/30 were upgraded to the 'high density' floppy drive in 1989. That's a guess, but I remember that students who bought their machines the year before me had setups with no hard drives, and the two floppy drives were both 800k. I remember feeling like my machine with the hard drive and the bigger floppy drive was all powerful.

By: mary

mary — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 09:31:46 +0000

This is kinda sad…my first computer was a dell with more memory than I know what to do with. It is incredible to think about were we will be in a few years. I have seen the tera drop to about $260 last I checked to free up my laptop. I could not even imagine having the patience to work on of these early machines. I get frustrated when google takes to long to load and meet it with an onslaught of mouse clicks like I am getting somewhere.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 09:29:28 +0000

Sam, ahh, yes, you are correct now that I think about it. Couldn't remember whether it was the SE or the SE/30. So did the machine have the 1.4MB “high density” floppy drive, and not just the 400k/800k drive?

By: fronesis

fronesis — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 06:05:52 +0000

I had the exact same machine! But I think the price in 1989 was $3,500 for the Mac SE/30. The lowly SE went for the bargain basement price of around $2,300 (with edu discount). I have some confidence in this figure because the trauma of writing the check is still burned into my memory!