We Really Have Come a Long Way

An ad from 1977: $1495 for 64k of RAM.



From the 80's: a PC Jr with 128k for ~$1300.



My first machine, an Atari 800 with 48k of RAM, was purchased in the early 80's. It came with a cassette drive, and my monitor was an old TV. I remember that it took the cassette player 4 minutes to load a 16k game like Pac Man or Donkey Kong but I thought it was quite wonderful. Eventually, I was able to upgrade from the cassette by purchasing a single-sided, floppy disk drive for somewhere in the neighbourhood of $400 - $500 (the prices had come down to that). The great thing about that disk drive was that it included a printer port, which otherwise would have cost an additional $100 or so. I used that machine to learn how to word process and to work with spread sheets and used both in my teaching. Although we soon changed to photo copiers, schools were still using those old ditto machines back then, and I would run the masters through my trusty nine pin, dot matrix printer, which was also very expensive, and my days of writing my teaching aids by hand were history.

I think my first MS-DOS machine (before Windows 3.1, which I later installed on it) had 4 megs of RAM and a hard drive of 100 megs and cost around $2000, probably in the early nineties. In retrospect, one of the funniest things, in a way, that I ever heard was said in our staff room several months after that purchase. A teacher had bought an even newer and more powerful machine and declared that he would never have to buy another computer. Apparently, he was quite wrong, and I didn't need to feel jealous. I pretty well knew how wrong he was at the time, but I confess to still feeling slight pangs of envy.

The several computers that came after that one also cost in the neighbourhood of $2000. By comparison, my newest baby is a 64 bit machine with quad core processor, 8 gigs of RAM, a terabyte HD, a 22" monitor and costs a fair bit less than two grand. Unfortunately, in four years time, it too will be a clunker.

Note: Ads found at Vintage Ad Browser

The Wonder of it All

Since we have a two-storey townhouse and I have no fondness for ladders, we had the window cleaners over to our place yesterday. It's not too expensive, so we're willing to ante up once a year.

When it was time to settle accounts, the guy pulled out his cell phone and used it as a calculator. That surprised me because I hadn't seen a cell phone used that way before. Sometimes, I have to step back and appreciate the near-magicality of technology. You see, I can still recall seeing my first pocket calculator and being enthralled with its wonderfulness.

It was during summer holidays near the mid-seventies, and we were visiting the family in Scarborough. One day while walking through Eatons in Shoppers World on The Danforth I saw it and was intrigued. I hadn't even been aware that such a marvel existed, and this four-function beauty was on sale for only one hundred bucks! Imagine a small machine that could add, subtract, multiply and divide! Amazing!

Could I have ever used that little gizmo. I was teaching, and computing averages was an exercise in brain power augmented by a slide rule type of device. It wasn't an actual slide rule but a cardboard wheel that used some slide rule principles. I would use my noggin to add up a kid's scores and then use the wheel to calculate the average. Sometimes, I'd make a little mistake while adding in my head, and the wheel could also be a percentage point or two off.

So, you see, I sure could have used that handy dandy little calculator.

I didn't buy it though. It was too dear; a hundred bucks was more than ten percent of my monthly salary at that point, so I resisted. Within a year or so I found one at Sears that had more capability for only thirty-five dollars. Now, of course, they are cheap almost throw-away instruments that we value little.

But it seemed a wonder to me back then and seeing a cell phone put to that use yesterday brought back that sense of wonder to some degree.