|
I'm not sure if prices are really indicative of how computers have changed, but here goes.
I remember paying around $700 for 64 megabytes of RAM some time after I started working fulltime. I recently paid $200 for 64 gigabytes for my NUC.
I remember paying over $900 for an HP scanner (with a SCSI interface). The last scanner I bought was $60. Actually, no, the last scanner I bought was integrated in a $150 scanner/printer combo.
When I started off, spending $2000 for a PC was the norm. Now I have a hard time justifying half of that.
The one consistent thing is video cards however. I've never paid more than a few hundred dollars for them, yet somehow there's still a market for $2000 video cards. This is an area where "more money than brains" comes to mind.
|
|
|
|
|
dandy72 wrote: yet somehow there's still a market for $2000 video cards. This is an area where "more money than brains" comes to mind.
Gamers
A home without books is a body without soul. Marcus Tullius Cicero
PartsBin an Electronics Part Organizer - Release Version 1.4.0 (Many new features) JaxCoder.com
Latest Article: EventAggregator
|
|
|
|
|
Well obviously those are the people who buy these cards. But you can still be a gamer with a $400 video card. There is a point of diminishing returns.
|
|
|
|
|
I have a friend that;
- Buys the latest gear; PC and video cards
- Puts nothing but the OS and game on his PC
- Every 3 months he fresh load OS and games
He's retired and that's all he does is game most of the day.
A home without books is a body without soul. Marcus Tullius Cicero
PartsBin an Electronics Part Organizer - Release Version 1.4.0 (Many new features) JaxCoder.com
Latest Article: EventAggregator
|
|
|
|
|
Mike Hankey wrote: Buys the latest gear; PC and video cards
Well, some people change cars every year, and you can hardly make a worst investment. There are worse ways to waste money on than PCs and video cards; they're still cheap, relatively speaking...
Mike Hankey wrote: Puts nothing but the OS and game on his PC
I see nothing wrong with that. I do have a machine I consider to be my dedicated gaming rig - there's literally nothing on it but the OS and games. Heck, I chat with other online players over Discord, and that is running on a separate computer.
Mike Hankey wrote: Every 3 months he fresh load OS and games
Now that, I do question. Since he uses his PC for nothing else, it's gotta be staying in a relatively clean state.
Mike Hankey wrote: He's retired and that's all he does is game most of the day.
Whatever floats his boat. I've always figured, when I retire, I'll probably keep both coding and gaming...but I suspect I'll do more of the former than the latter.
|
|
|
|
|
I thought when I retired I would slow down, but at 75 I'm working as hard as I did when I was working.
If you slow down, you die!
A home without books is a body without soul. Marcus Tullius Cicero
PartsBin an Electronics Part Organizer - Release Version 1.4.0 (Many new features) JaxCoder.com
Latest Article: EventAggregator
|
|
|
|
|
Right now, I code during the day for work, and spend my evenings gaming to wind down.
I don't expect my schedule to change much; it's just that after retirement, my "work hours" will be (ideally) spent on my own little pet projects. Things I've been meaning to work on for years, but would never pay the bills.
At some point in time, I wrote plenty of little side projects in my spare time, and coding for both work and a hobby just lead to a burnout. I often find myself longing to work on my pet projects again...but not if that's what I'm gonna do day in, day out.
|
|
|
|
|
During the hotter months, I live in FL I work outside about 1-2 hours a day.
We've spent 3 years totally remodeling an old house that needed a lot of work.
We have a large wooded lot and right now I have about 3 large trees down and 4 more that need be brought down before next hurricane. They have to be cut, split and hauled to a place where an elderly lady, that heats her house with wood can come and load them in her truck.
When I'm not outside I read, a lot, code and am learning to play piano.
And as the weather here is starting to get cooler, the roles will reverse spending more time outside trying to get everything done.
It never ends!
A home without books is a body without soul. Marcus Tullius Cicero
PartsBin an Electronics Part Organizer - Release Version 1.4.0 (Many new features) JaxCoder.com
Latest Article: EventAggregator
|
|
|
|
|
dandy72 wrote: Mike Hankey wrote:Every 3 months he fresh load OS and games
Now that, I do question. Since he uses his PC for nothing else, it's gotta be staying in a relatively clean state.
I have a friend doing the same. He is not a gamer, but a heavy user of a program giving you 90 days of free use, before you have to pay. He cannot afford the price(I know that is true!), and he hasn't discovered which registry entries must be deleted, in addition to uninstalling the program after 90 days. He has tried 'everything', and the only way he knows to make the program 'forget' that he has already had his 90 days of free use is to format the disk and reinstall everything.
I know that there are tools for monitoring all file system and registry operations (e.g. in Sysinternals) during an installation, to see which registry entries and files are created. I have used that myself for similar purposes, but it took me quite some effort to analyze the logs. My friend does not have the background to do it. I am not going to do the job for him. He thinks a complete reinstall four times a year is OK. Besides, if his PC has been infected with some malware, the reformatting will clean it up. It will sweep away that software he downloaded just to try it out. It will free up all his temporary files.
He of course keeps all his user files on separate disks. This includes installers for all the programs he wants to reinstall during a cleanup.
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
|
|
|
|
|
Sounds like he would benefit tremendously from running a VM, even if only for that one application. What I'd do in a situation like that is install the OS, bring it up to date, create a checkpoint, then install the app. Once the app expires, restore from the checkpoint, then optionally bring the system up to date and create a new checkpoint (merging with the previous one), then reinstall the app. Or even if he didn't bring his checkpoint up to date (always restoring back to the original), it would still be a big time saver. It's not really reinstalling the OS and bringing it up to date that takes time, it's the million little tweaks we all make to our systems over time that do. So if he only used the VM for his one app (and otherwise not bother with the tweaks, or at least apply them before doing his original checkpoint) that would be a lot of time saved.
You do make a good point about the opportunity to clean up malware, or even random downloads that just won't uninstall themselves cleanly. Again, a VM would do wonders.
But I'd understand if that was still too much for him to handle. I applaud anyone who doesn't shy away from repaving.
|
|
|
|
|
dandy72 wrote: But I'd understand if that was still too much for him to handle.
I guess it would be. He probably wouldn't think so himself, and the support he would need from me would be too much for me to handle 
Another side: For economic reasons, he has always been running on historic hardware. For many years, his hardware has been lacking the features required for running modern VMs. He recently bought a new 'cigar box' PC which could run a VM, but the regular re-installation of the OS is routine work, and has been for at least 6-8 years. He thinks it is OK.
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
|
|
|
|
|
trønderen wrote: 'cigar box' PC
I had to look that up, but Google didn't return much with that terminology.
I suspect you mean one of those small PCs, barely 5x5 inches (if that big). I have a few of those, and love them to the point where I loaded two of them with 64GB of RAM - they're both dedicated to running VMs (I use them rather extensively for work).
But even "only" 16GB should be plenty for his one app.
|
|
|
|
|
dandy72 wrote: The one consistent thing is video cards however. I've never paid more than a few hundred dollars for them, yet somehow there's still a market for $2000 video cards. This is an area where "more money than brains" comes to mind.
About 15 years ago I worked with a young guy who had EVERY electronic toy known to man. He was a rabid gamer, and bought the newest top-of-the-line video card every 6 months. At that time the cards went for $500-$700. Yeah, they run about $2,000 today.
There is value in having a better card. I installed Skyrim about 7 years ago and my video card was insufficient, so I purchased a better one that cost more than double the most expensive GPU I had previous purchased. I was surprised, as the overall speed of my system noticeably improved. I would not buy one of the high-end cards, but buying above average was worth it.
|
|
|
|
|
Right. I tend to buy "second-best" (not what is top of the line at the time of my purchase, but just slightly lower), and very often you'd have a hard time telling the difference unless you went out of your way to compare the specs. And (IMO) if that's what you have to do, you're trying too hard to justify the extra expense.
That being said, the video card in my current gaming rig is about 10 years old. And I feel like I don't have any incentive to replace it until GTA6 comes out...
|
|
|
|
|
I remember when I bought my first 486 back in the day, and specified a Tseng labs ET4000 based video card, because it was then the mutt's nuts for performance.
|
|
|
|
|
dandy72 wrote: The one consistent thing is video cards however. I've never paid more than a few hundred dollars for them, yet somehow there's still a market for $2000 video cards. This is an area where "more money than brains" comes to mind.
I bought an AMD Ryzen 6900xt when I did my pc for 990€ (around 900$), it was the third best casd in that moment. And... it will remain in my pc until it gets broken.
My primary reason to buy it? I could afford it and it was easier to get one from AMD shop than the 6800XT (was my first selection). Extern shops were minimum 175% (up to 350%) of the official price and I didn't want to pay that (although I actually could)
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
|
|
|
|
|
I bought a customer a 2gb SCSI drive in 1992 and it was ~ £2000 - and very difficult to find one.
In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity. - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
|
|
|
|
|
Oh, just read your post. I posted about buying a 1000MB drive in 91 or so and it being $1 / MB.
|
|
|
|
|
About the same price then
In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity. - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
|
|
|
|
|
In the fall of 1986 my parents purchased the brand new Apple ][gs for somewhere in the ballpark of $2500 after a RAM upgrade
It had 1MB of RAM, a 3.5 inch floppy, a 5.25 inch floppy, color screen with a mouse and gui, and ran at up to a blistering 2MHz. It's main selling points were the better than EGA but worse than VGA graphics, and actually nice 16-bit ensoniq sound hardware. You could get apple speakers for it made by bose but we didn't.
Eventually we got a 40MB hard drive for it (2 20MB partitions because that's all GS/OS and ProDOS could handle. I don't know what that set my parents back, but it replaced the power supply in the PC, which should tell you how "intended" a hard drive was for that machine.
Today my desktop cost in the same ballpark.
I have a i5-13600K CPU at 5.1GHz, 32GB of RAM, 6TB of fast 990 Pro NVMe storage, and all the fixins. I bought it about 2 years ago.
I don't know how many orders of magnitude more powerful it is, even breaking down the speed metrics and comparing them because cycle of my current CPU is like many cycles of the old 65C816 in that apple.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
|
|
|
|
|
This brought to mind the great advances in power consumption of older and newer devices.
In the mid 1970's I was in college and had a co-op job working for IBM in their Philadelphia data center. It was downtown located midway up one of the high rises. They did education and system support and had the latest IBM 370 mainframe computer. The mainframe consisted of 4 refrigerator sized (think of a double door large modern model) components and ran from standard building 3 phase power.
In a cost cutting move IBM management decided that since the data center only supported education it really did not need the latest and greatest. So they replaced it with a very old IBM 360 model. This model required it's own dedicated motor/generator to supply the filtered power to the mainframe. The motor/generator was huge (roughly 2 meters long by a meter and a half high). It looked like it belonged in the engine room of a large ship. The only problem was to spin the motor/generator up to the proper speed to generate stable power required it would look like a major short circuit to the building power. The operations manager went through the start up draw and matched it against the building's power and figured it would be fine. However, the building engineer felt that the safety trips in the building would stutter and not supply enough power to get the generator up to speed.
The engineer had a work around. They could disable the safety trips for the few seconds that the mass surge of power was needed.
On the day they were going to try this I got a chance to go to the building's power management core (located in that hidden floor in the middle of the building). The fuses in this part of the building were scary, huge. The fuse was as long as your arm (tip of fingers to elbow) and as thick as your leg. There was a special circuit breaker in front of the fuse that was the problem. It was there to protect the fuse (the engineer said they cost thousands of dollars to replace). That circuit breaker was the problem. It would set and then reset as the motor/generator pulled power to get started. Thus starving the motor/generator and preventing it from ever reaching it's intended speed. So even though the draw was within the safety range of the fuse, the circuit breaker would prevent the motor/generator from spinning up. The work-around was to jam a broom against the circuit breaker reset preventing it from tripping. The engineer handed the broom to my ops manager and said the responsibility was all his.
He jammed the broom against the reset and called upstairs to hit the start button. The only thing we noticed was a slight clicking noise from the circuit breaker but the motor started up and got up to speed without popping the fuse. Mission accomplished. Well almost. I later learned that the surge of electricity that got used by the start up caused a number of other buildings down stream to blackout. The manager of the data center facility spent many days in meetings with city, power company and building management of the affected buildings. They placed a cardboard box over the off button with the data center ops manager's number on it and warnings to never turn the motor/generator off.
Oh, by the way, the PC you have plugged into your wall socket has more processing power than that IBM 360.
|
|
|
|
|
I cannot help but notice that we have many Yorkshiremen in the lounge 
And, not to be outdone, my first floating point computing device in high school was a sliding rule. It took about 5 seconds to do a multiplication, hence processor speed = 0.2Hz.
Like every kid of that era, for integer arithmetic I used an abacus in primary school but I don't remember much about it.
Mircea
|
|
|
|
|
I also had a slide rule and was reasonably proficient with it, often getting an extra significant digit by doing that part of the calculation in my head. In 1973, it got replaced by an HP-45 calculator.
|
|
|
|
|
|
It was de riguer for engineering students to have a slide rule prior to the days of calculators.
|
|
|
|
|
General 
News 
Suggestion 
Question 
Bug 
Answer 
Joke 
Praise 
Rant 
Admin 
Submit an article or tip
