MOTM

While still digging in the closet (looking for NOS Xpander switches), I found my 1990 check
register.

In May of 1990, I bought:

486SX (no cache), 16Mhz computer (no video card, no monitor, no hard drive): $1175
340MB Conner hard drive: $775
32MB RAM: $385
Paradise (remember them?) "Basic VGA" card: $185 It had 800 x 600 VESA mode in DOS!!! For OrCAD.

Total for my 'CAD System' : $2520

Sigh.......let's see.....in 1990 I was at Tandy making about $26K/yr. CAD System was 10% of my
GROSS pay (cough cough). And I was married with a 2yr old baby.

Staples office supply has a Compaq system, 1.8GHz P4 with DVD, 256MB, 15" LCD monitor, 60GB HD
for $1199. That's 1.95% of my GROSS pay from my MOTM salary. Oh, and speakers and a Modem and a
10/100 LAN and a small printer.

Paul S.

I feel your past pain Beavis...

In '91, when my wife started on her PhD, we bought her a Mac laptop 
with a whopping 4MB of RAM and COLOR display!!!  All the USC people 
(where mac is the standard) thought that was the coolest thing on the 
planet.  Cost-$2400.  Use today-games for a 4 year old...

Maybe I should make that my sequencer computer!

To hear people talk about the wopping $2400-$2500 they spent on a computer is 
amusing. I spent $2400 just on 8Meg of memory for my Mac II, and that was half 
the price some vendors were selling it at during those memory shortage times. 
This was the time when a 1024x768 24bit slow as a snail dumb framebuffer (no 
graphics acceleration) graphics card listed for $4000, and how about a $3000 
19" monitor to run it on. Today when I hear people complain about the price of 
a new Mac for instance, I just think to myself those ungrateful bastards have 
never had is so good and they don't even know it.

-Elhardt