[HN Gopher] Vintage computer ads that show how far we've progres...
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Vintage computer ads that show how far we've progressed, 1970-1990
Author : davesailer
Score : 164 points
Date : 2022-05-21 13:17 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (rarehistoricalphotos.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (rarehistoricalphotos.com)
| johnklos wrote:
| Tangential rant: Why are so many sites these days so Google-
| centric? All the world isn't a modern computer and/or running
| Chrome. webp is not a universal standard yet.
|
| Are hosting services that allow serving different files based on
| user agent really that hard to find? Or has everyone just drank
| the Google Flavor Aid?
| josephcsible wrote:
| WebP is a standard. And serving different files to different
| user agents makes the problem you're describing worse, not
| better.
| johnklos wrote:
| It's a standard, but it isn't a universal standard. Know the
| difference.
|
| Until a standard has both been accepted by a significant
| majority, and there has been plenty of time for the standard
| to be adopted, it's bad to simply turn on a feature and say,
| "screw you" to everyone who has an older device or computer
| that can't run the latest software.
|
| Serving different files to different user agents is not
| desirable, sure, but it's better than this crap - have the
| latest or it doesn't work. You know this, I think.
|
| So is it that people are shitty and elitist, or is that
| people are just ignorant? If the former, then we can't change
| that - people will be shitty if they choose to be shitty.
| Sounds like you advocate for that.
|
| If people are just ignorant about the fact that their web
| site doesn't work on older phones, tablets, Macs, or older
| non-Chrome browsers, then they should be told.
| josephcsible wrote:
| It isn't just the Chromium monoculture that supports WebP,
| though. Firefox and Safari both do too. What other browsers
| do you want to support it before you'll consider it
| universal?
|
| And for people with operating systems too old to run any
| browser version that supports WebP, they're also way behind
| on security updates, so we should be encouraging them to
| upgrade to a newer OS.
| [deleted]
| robrorcroptrer wrote:
| Seems to me there's not been much progress.
| beebeepka wrote:
| On the contrary. I think surveillance has progressed
| considerably and our transition into a full blown global
| dystopia is on track
| drewcoo wrote:
| Moore's Law porn.
|
| As to how far we have progressed, I'd rather see us talk about
| how we interact with technology and how it changes our lives.
|
| Smart phones are powerful computers. They are ubiquitous. They're
| the computers we all have now. What have they accomplished? I can
| always contact someone, though loneliness seems to have
| increased. People can also contact me all the time, sometimes
| with video. Nobody wears watches because they carry phones, so we
| missed the Dick Tracy future. Nobody can be lost anymore because
| they (and many other entities) always know where on earth they
| are. All of those things are absent from the old ads.
|
| Our "progress" is mostly about surveillance whereas the old ads
| were all about what individuals could accomplish. And there's
| definitely progress in how things are marketed to us. Aren't
| those old ads clunky?
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Don't forget to adjust for inflation. A $4.5k disk drive in 1990
| would cost around $9k today.
|
| https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
| truthwhisperer wrote:
| mlom wrote:
| this doesn't show we've progressed at all, it just shows we're
| still distracted by colors and lights
| usrn wrote:
| I honestly think nothing has really changed. You can see SCO
| saying "We have graphics now! People will want to use Unix on the
| desktop now" all the way back in the 80s. Computers keep getting
| bigger but the software keeps up with it. All that's really
| changed is that we have more computers since the smallest ones
| are so cheap, even so we had cheap MCUs back then.
| pbw wrote:
| A modern HDD is 15-30 million times cheaper per byte than that
| 10mb "hard disk you've been waiting for" ad according to
| diskprices.com. What will get 30 million times better in the
| future vs. what is tapped out?
|
| If you adjust for inflation assuming the year was 1980, the drive
| would cost $12,000 in today's dollars. So today's drives are over
| 800 million times cheaper. Plus lighter and way faster I'm sure.
| So more than 1B times better, easily, with 42 years of progress.
| masswerk wrote:
| Now you could argue that there's less space on a modern drive,
| given how file sizes increased. Even 5MB was massive then, with
| mostly text files.
|
| I still recall when I had to upgrade from MS Word 4.x/Mac,
| which did still fit on a single floppy (together with a basic
| OS), to MS Word 5.x/Mac, which was more then 5MB, on an MPB 100
| with a 20MB disk: I had to dump half of the installed
| applications most of the data in order for Word to fit. Soon,
| HDs increased to 10 times the size to keep up with this, but
| soon enough, 220MB was less than that 20MB had been before.
| Same with GB-drives, and so on. If you want to transpile a
| simple text file of a few lines into another simple text file,
| you may need an entire drive for dependencies...
|
| To my own observations, drive sizes always stayed about the
| same in relation to what you could put onto them. But, at the
| same time, requirements for temporary storage are steadily
| increasing, which may provide you with even less usable space.
|
| As for price, yes, economies of scale. If you're selling
| billions and billions of drives, you may do things that were
| unthinkable, when the total number of sales was still in the
| 100Ks, at a fraction of the cost.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > the Apple Laser Printer quickly became the preferred printer of
| choice for computer owners of all brands.
|
| In 1984? No, it did not. Most everyone was using dot matrix
| printers in 1984.
| tlb wrote:
| It's the one everyone preferred, but not many could afford.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| For business printing the standard was the daisy wheel - which
| was insanely loud and sounded like a machine gun.
|
| Between 2X and 6X as expensive as a dot matrix. So around $2k
| for a mid-price model and $4k for a faster and more reliable
| model at the high end.
|
| Dot matrix printers were relatively affordable. But still
| expensive. Maybe $300 for a budget model, up to a few k for a
| high end model with a 132 chars and a double density print
| head.
|
| Adjusted prices are roughly 2.7X. So almost $800 for a basic
| dot matrix, up to a ballpark $10k for a high end printer.
|
| Just for printing.
|
| Compare with today where a mono laser costs ~$150 for a basic
| model, $300-$600 for added scanning and copying, and $400-$800
| for a colour laser with extra features.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Thanks for this. I was fortunate to have an Epson FX-80 dot
| matrix printer in 1983. My father bought it for me. I had no
| idea they were so expensive - at least $1500 in todays
| dollars (I could only find the price of the MX-80 in 1983,
| not the FX-80 which was even more expensive).
|
| I wish my father was alive for me to thank him yet again for
| this marvelous gift that must have put him out quite a bit.
| ivraatiems wrote:
| Something that I often find frustrating about modern technology
| is how little we do with the vast amounts of processing power we
| have. A lot of what we are doing now - word processing,
| spreadsheets, email, web browsing - was done by machines with a
| fraction of the computing power two decades ago. What does it
| matter if the numbers get bigger if the use cases are the same?
| zackmorris wrote:
| I feel that single-threaded processing power stopped increasing
| at 2 major events in history:
|
| * The arrival of video cards around 1997 (focus shifted from
| general computation to digital signal processing)
|
| * The arrival of the iPhone around 2007 (focus shifted from
| performance to power consumption)
|
| I'd vote to undo these setbacks by moving to local data
| processing, where a large number of cores each have 1/N of the
| total memory, shared by M memory busses. Memory controllers
| would manage shuffling data to where it's needed so that the
| memory appears as 1 contiguous address space to any process.
|
| In other words, this would look identical to the desktop CPUs
| we have today, just with a large number of cores (over 256) and
| a memory bandwidth many hundreds or thousands of times faster
| than what we have now if it uses content-addressable memory
| with copy-on-write internally. The speed difference is like
| comparing BitTorrent to FTP, and why GPUs run orders of
| magnitude faster than CPUs (unfortunately limited to their
| narrow use cases).
|
| This would let us get back to traditional programming in the
| language of our choice (perhaps something like Erlang, Go or
| Octave/MATLAB) rather than shaders.
|
| Apple appears to be trying to do this with their M1 and ideas
| loosely borrowed from transputers. But since their goals are
| proprietary, they won't approach anything close to the general
| computing power available from the transistor count for at
| least a decade, maybe never.
|
| So there's an opportunity here for someone to reintroduce
| multicore CPUs and scalable transputers composed of them. Then
| we could write whatever OpenGL/Vulkan/Metal/TensorFlow
| libraries we wanted over that, since they are trivial with the
| right architecture.
|
| This would also allow us to drop async and parallel keywords
| from our languages and just use higher-order methods which are
| self-parallelizing. Processing big data would "just work" since
| Amdahl's law only applies to serial and sequential computation.
|
| The advantages are so numerous that I struggle to understand
| why things would stay the way they are other than due to the
| Intel/Nvidia hegemony. And I've felt this way since 1997, back
| when people thought I was crazy for projecting to the endgame
| like with any other engineering challenge.
| russdill wrote:
| The shift to a focus on power consumption was already
| happening anyway without the iphone even on desktop. CPUs
| were already in the nuclear reactor territory as far as being
| able to produce as much heat per unit area
| temac wrote:
| > I'd vote to undo these setbacks by moving to local data
| processing, where a large number of cores each have 1/N of
| the total memory, shared by M memory busses. Memory
| controllers would manage shuffling data to where it's needed
| so that the memory appears as 1 contiguous address space to
| any process.
|
| Cheap RAM is DDR. Fast RAM would be on-die but that would be
| very expansive, or maybe now on package (but with some tech
| to be developed). But appart from decoupling latencies of
| accesses, I don't really see the point of having N busses
| (from local core to its local memory), especially if you need
| a very large number of cores. More memory channels seems good
| enough. The bandwidth is already hard to saturate on well-
| designed SoC like the M1 Pro and above, probably improvement
| to the latency could yield to better benefits than trying to
| increase the bandwidth more.
|
| > In other words, this would look identical to the desktop
| CPUs we have today, just with a large number of cores (over
| 256) and a memory bandwidth many hundreds or thousands of
| times faster than what we have now if it uses content-
| addressable memory with copy-on-write internally. The speed
| difference is like comparing BitTorrent to FTP, and why GPUs
| run orders of magnitude faster than CPUs (unfortunately
| limited to their narrow use cases).
|
| "content-addressable memory with copy-on-write internally"
| are you describing what caches already kind of do, in a way
| (esp. if I mix that with: "memory appears as 1 contiguous
| address space to any process")? The good news would then be:
| we already have them :)
|
| What remains, that I think I fully understand what you mean,
| seems to be: more cores. The other good news here is that: it
| is in progress. If 6 years ago you would have gotten 6 to 8
| cores on an enthusiast platform, you would now probably chose
| 12 to 16 cores on just a basic one (and even more on a modern
| enthusiast one)
|
| There has been a pause but in recent years but it was
| basically Intel having process difficulties, and being caught
| up by the rest of the industry. Including some with power
| consumption _also_ in mind, and given what an high perf CPU
| dissipates today, power consumption has also become key to
| unlock raw performance anyway.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| Modern software benefits from increased computational power
| because it allows new features and speeding up older ones.
| Sure, "office" apps don't benefit much, but you're ignoring
| many fields where they do benefit.
|
| For example, the field of 3D graphics. Games and animated
| movies have become a lot more realistic and feature filled
| thanks to more powerful graphics cards. In fact, Disney
| specifically puts a lot of effort into making hair realistic.
| That was impractical a decade ago, and impossible a decade
| prior.
| ivraatiems wrote:
| You're absolutely right about 3D graphics, but how much time
| does the average desktop computer user spend rendering hair?
|
| Even if you need bigtime compute power for video games, there
| are game streaming services where someone else's computer
| will do that for you.
|
| I have a high-end graphics card and all the processing power
| I need to play games... but I am still wasting all of that
| whenever that isn't what I'm doing, aren't I?
| umanwizard wrote:
| > I am still wasting all of that whenever that isn't what
| I'm doing, aren't I?
|
| How is this different from owning anything? I have a bike,
| but I'm not riding it literally all the time. But I still
| don't think owning it is a waste.
| ant6n wrote:
| Meh. Are the stories being created with games getting better?
| For example, Half Life and Portal are pretty modern and
| immersive and run on some 20-year-old hardware.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| The story lines and the graphics are orthogonal. It's
| possible to immersive and fun games with "poor" graphics
| (Portal) and it's possible to have bad storylines with
| amazing graphics.
|
| Even if you're fond/nostalgic for older hardware and games,
| that doesn't mean you can't recognize that things have
| improved.
| ant6n wrote:
| Well if the overarching point is that nowadays we have so
| much computing power, and it doesn't really result in
| better experiences, and that most things one would want
| to do could've been done on much older hardware, then
| it's kind of the point that the graphics are orthogonal
| to a fun gaming experience.
| falcor84 wrote:
| Meh. Are stories being created in books getting better? For
| example, The Decameron and Canterbury Tales are pretty
| impressive and were written before the printing press.
| Swizec wrote:
| The difference is that you can now casually manipulate a
| spreadsheet of the size that would choke a supercomputer back
| then ... on an iPad.
|
| My _watch_ has orders of magnitude more processing power and
| working memory than my first PC in the mid 90's. It weighs
| maybe 200 grams and runs on battery power for ~20 hours.
|
| If that doesn't feel like progress then I dunno ...
| PeterisP wrote:
| We sell entry level computers that choke on small
| spreadsheets and are less responsive than the same size
| spreadsheet was 25 years ago on a computer with a thousand
| times less computing power.
|
| Yes, we can handle much larger data now, however, most people
| don't do that, their needs for documents and spreadsheets are
| just the same as it was earlier, but modern systems somehow
| manage to be worse despite having orders of magnitude more
| processing power and working memory.
| rglullis wrote:
| You couldn't do it at the same time. It's nice to say "we could
| run a spreadsheet or listen to music", but it's almost like
| these were mutually exclusive. Winamp was light on resources,
| but if you went on to try a large-ish sheet on Excel, the music
| would skip, or the app would crash, or both.
| hansel_der wrote:
| true, early pc's were really bad at multitasking but i
| haven't had much problems since DMA and L2 caches were
| available.
| [deleted]
| cgriswald wrote:
| A lot of what I'm doing now would have been insanely expensive
| or simply impossible when I was a kid. Just as a for instance,
| I have a half petabyte of video and music stored on a local
| server to play over my local network. That half petabyte of
| storage is fast enough to serve over the local network and cost
| less than 1/3 the price of 10 megabytes of storage in the
| advertisements in the article.
| neurostimulant wrote:
| If developers could trade more resources usage (cpu, memory,
| storage, network bandwidth) for better developer ux, they would
| do it in a heartbeat, which is why no matter how much computing
| power has progressed, most softwares doesn't seem to get any
| faster and keep using more and more resources. On the plus
| side, software development is much easier today compared to
| decades ago.
| samatman wrote:
| Personally I talk to computers a lot these days.
|
| It isn't riveting conversation, just stuff like "Sunset" (to
| make the lights warmer), "remind me to buy cheese when I get to
| $GroceryStore", "play $album please", but it adds up.
|
| I also take a lot of pictures, which have become unreasonably
| good to the point where I'm still learning how to take a better
| picture with my fancy mirrorless than I can take with my phone.
| Both of them are computers.
|
| After I take those pictures it does accurate analysis of what's
| in them, so when I search for cats, or spider, or flowers, it
| finds them. It does this on the device, which is pretty cool.
|
| I have another computer that flies, I can tell it to fly
| circles around a target or do a bit of following. It's neither
| an expensive nor featureful example of its class. It flies for
| a real 25 minutes on one battery and weighs 249 grams.
|
| There's another one which cleans my floor, to be honest we
| could have done an okay job of that in the 90s, batteries and
| chips were almost up to it.
|
| Then there's the one that I can tell to make fantasy dwarves
| and it just does it. I think that's the one younger me would
| have been most impressed by.
| sumthinprofound wrote:
| I recall alot of advertisements in computer magazines from the
| late 80s featuring bikini girls and sexual innuendo.
| hansel_der wrote:
| that's still a thing
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Where? I don't see it in the US at all.
| firstSpeaker wrote:
| Thank you for sharing this.
| nixnax wrote:
| tomohawk wrote:
| When I think about how freeing having a personal computer was
| back then, and then think about how computing devices are used
| now to track people, control speech, and generally keep people in
| line - I don't think of progress.
| gumby wrote:
| I remember many of those ads from when they appeared!
|
| I like that the author showed a lot of ads with girls operating
| the computer. Typically it was boys (or whatever) with his sister
| just passively standing by. Of course it was the 80s and
| apparently it was quite common for the "family computer" to be
| installed in the son's room.
|
| TBH my favorite part was being reminded of the absurd clothing
| people wore in those days and the incredible clutter of _stuff_
| people had everywhere.
| rmason wrote:
| Those ads really take me back. I had a college friend tell me in
| 1974 that everyone would have a computer on their desk by 1984.
| We ruthlessly mocked him for it. But in 1983 I got a computer on
| my desk at the fertilizer plant. There was zero software for the
| fertilizer industry at the time. So I started with Lotus 123 and
| taught myself the macro language and set out to create it.
|
| Then I convinced my boss to buy me a copy of dBase II and set out
| to learn that as well. I was spending every work night until 11
| pm. Got tired of that so I withdrew $3500 out of my meager
| savings and bought an IBM XT clone from a new company in Flint. I
| remember adding a modem so that I could explore CompuServe, a
| large mainframe based online service by H & R Block.
| Jeema101 wrote:
| I miss those days. I feel like back then computers naturally
| encouraged exploration and learning. There was no internet, or
| even modems in most cases, so there was no alternative but
| exploration - trying to figure out what all you could do with
| this strange piece of hardware.
|
| I'm not entirely sure I'm just jaded by time - I feel like maybe
| computers became commodity appliances, for an entirely different
| crowd, but I stayed the same.
| sircastor wrote:
| I grew up with a Mac so my experience was a little different,
| but I'm amazed at people who's first experience sitting down at
| a computer was starting at an unforgiving blinking cursor.
| causality0 wrote:
| _By the time the 1980s came to an end, it was unusual for a
| household to be without a personal computer._
|
| Only fifteen percent of American households had a computer in
| 1990.
| flomo wrote:
| In 1990, it would have been somewhat rare for a college student
| to own a computer, but there were computer labs everywhere on
| campus and you had an email address, so it was clear they a
| part of modern life. They were priced in the 'used car' range
| so it wasn't impossible to own one.
|
| (edit this was for a 'real' PC compatible or Mac, you could
| probably find C64s and etc at the flea market.)
| luma wrote:
| In my freshman year in 1993, I was the only person on my
| floor to haul a PC into the dorms. Across 4 buildings each
| with a dozen floors, there was maybe ten people who had
| computers in their room. The only reason I had one was
| because dad was an IBMer and he managed to obtain an XT 286
| for me.
| Cockbrand wrote:
| TIL there was an XT 286. I always thought that the 286 was
| exclusive to the AT.
| NateLawson wrote:
| Same year, and every engineering and CS student I knew had
| one in their dorm room. The lowest spec I saw was 386SX-16
| with 2 MB and the highest was 486DX-50 with 16 MB RAM. Most
| used DOS/Windows but the CS students dual booted to Linux
| (Slackware mostly, some SLS).
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Only fifteen percent of American households had a computer in
| 1990._
|
| People overestimate the speed of the spread of computers.
|
| I didn't have a computer where I worked until 1994. And then,
| it was shared by eight people.
|
| At my next job in 1995, I made them buy a computer for the
| office as a term of employment. At the time, I suggested that a
| laptop might be a good option, since the computer would be
| shared by three people. For the next two years, the sales guys
| made fun of me for wanting to put a computer, and for wanting
| one that fits on my lap.
|
| I later heard that when I left, they sold the computer. I
| wonder how those blissfully computer-free sales guys are doing
| today.
|
| When I worked for Westinghouse in 1996 was the first time I was
| in an office that has one computer per person. But not every
| department had computers at all. And most who did were just
| terminals hooked up to a Vax in accounting.
|
| When I worked for a large regional media company in 1997,
| everyone had a computer. Only a couple of them had internet
| access, and that was only e-mail. This was during the days when
| so many people were getting AOL at home that it became
| uselessly bogged down by its own popularity.
|
| 1999: Everyone in the office had their own computer. Not
| everyone used them. But at least they all had internet access.
|
| (OT: I'm sad that the macOS spell checker didn't know the word
| "Vax" just now)
| PopAlongKid wrote:
| Your comment is about business use of computers, not
| households. I worked at a Fortune 200 company and from
| 1985-1989 much of my job was helping roll out desktop
| computers and networking (including email) throughout our
| fairly large geographical territory. By 1990 I'd estimate
| conservatively that well over half of our office workers had
| their own networked PC on their desk.
|
| I remember buying an AST 386 for my use at home, I'm guessing
| it cost about $4K or more in today's dollars, so it is true
| that business-class PCs at home were probably relatively rare
| at that time.
| maestroia wrote:
| In 1995, I started replacing the WYSE VT-100 terminals at
| my small workplace with Pentium desktops, in order to
| prepare for the switch to client-server in the next ERP
| version. They averaged fron $2700/ea ($5100 today) data
| entry models, to $3500 for mine, to $5200 ($9800 today) for
| the mechanical engineering system. (I still have my notes.)
| ddulaney wrote:
| I know this isn't relevant to the point about usage in 1990,
| but it shocks me (as somebody born in 1995) that over the
| course of 4 years you went from being ridiculed over
| demanding a computer to a computer on everyone's desk. 4
| years!
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Heres something for you to consider.
|
| I remember in the late 80s most people could not type.
| Typing was done by secretaries and was a specialized skill.
| There were (optional) for-credit classes in high school
| dedicated to teaching typing and nothing else.
|
| I got a bunch of part-time temp office jobs as a teenager
| because I could type fast, having grown up with computers,
| while my friends would get jobs at supermarkets or
| convenience stores, etc.
|
| The temp agencies had me do typing tests (on typewriters,
| not computers) before placing me. I blew them away at some
| ungodly WPM speed that I no longer remember. Not atypical
| by todays standards, I'm sure, but standards were different
| then.
|
| Often I would be the only person in a small office who
| could type. I certainly was the only male who could type.
| Everyone else was female.
|
| Imagine that today!
| pcrh wrote:
| Well... I remember in 1996 when first working on the US
| west coast at a research institute that the prof. would
| have his admin assistant print-out emails; he would hand-
| write responses that the admin assistant would type into
| the computer :-D
| ghaff wrote:
| I worked for a large computer systems company starting in
| the second half of the 80s. We had minicomputer based
| email all along--we made the computers and the software.
| But there were definitely execs who did likewise.
| ghaff wrote:
| Calculators had a similar trajectory. I used slide rules
| throughout high school. I needed a calculator for college
| and got a TI engineering calculator for probably something
| like $200 in mid-70s dollars. Got a probably discontinued
| HP a couple of years later for probably the same amount.
| Not sure how long before they were ubiquitous in the
| general population but probably not more than 5 years or
| so.
| 13of40 wrote:
| That's an interesting experience, because my family got our
| first home computer in about 1981, the kid down the street
| had one, and there was one in my first grade class around the
| same time. From then on, they were available in every school
| I attended, and my (rural Oregon) highschool in the early 90s
| had four computer labs - for programming, typing, newspaper
| layout, and CAD. My friend and I were watching AcidWarp on
| his 386 in about 1991. I had an Amiga at that point, and it
| was actually a bit of a relic even though it could blow my
| friend's PC out of the water for certain things. Our town
| library had a computer system and the office where my dad
| worked had a Data General mainframe they called the "DG". By
| 1993 I had a Linux box that I was running as a BBS, and I saw
| HTML for the first time in the Army in 1995. Then one day I
| stepped off a train at a random stop in Pusan, Korea in 1996
| and some dude about my age walked up and said hi, and we
| ended up hanging out with his friends and they showed me a
| Mac with a web browser...and the world was never the same
| again.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| reaperducer wrote:
| Different contexts. Uptake in homes was swift. I had a home
| computer in 1982. But my comment was about computers in
| offices.
|
| Businesses change slowly. Equipment doesn't get replaced on
| a whim. It has to be amortized and there's tax thingies
| that mean business equipment lifecycles are 3 to 5 years,
| minimum.
| 13of40 wrote:
| That's a good point. We had computers in our homes a lot
| of the time, and in schools I believe they were
| subsidized by tech companies like Apple. The 80s and 90s
| businesses that I got to see basically had antiquated
| mainframes and mini computers. The Army had PCs for
| office use, but the field equipment was VAX or (in the
| case of our anti-aircraft radar) some obscure form of
| Unix. That said, you still couldn't swing a cat without
| bumping it into a CRT.
| Semaphor wrote:
| We (in Germany) didn't have one until I was 12 in 1998, before
| that I'd visit my dad at work sometimes to play Prince of
| Persia on his office computer. I guess technically we had a
| Sinclair ZX81 in the cellar, but I wouldn't find out about that
| till much later ;)
| ant6n wrote:
| We (in Germany), by 1998, had 3 computers at home: a 400 mhz
| celeron connected to the internet, a hand me down 486 for my
| brother, and a hand me down 386 for me. All me friends were
| starting to get access to pentiums with tnts, by 2000
| everybody was playing UT and counterstike.
| VLM wrote:
| I suspect some statistical weirdness going on in the precise
| formulation of the survey question.
|
| I know for a fact 30M commodore 64s were sold in the 80s in the
| USA. Not all commodores, not all home computers, just the
| classic model C64, 30M units sold. That's in a country that
| used to only have 250M people, so in theory 12% of Americans as
| of 1990 had purchased one specific model, the C64, leaving only
| 3% for all other models combined, which seems very unlikely.
|
| Some of those probably went to schools not homes, although
| schools were owned by Apple II in those days...
|
| My suspicion is many of those were unused in basements and
| closets, or the question was phrased weirdly like "have you
| purchased a computer in the last three years" or "used a home
| computer in the last month" or they defined "home computer" to
| be "not an IBM (office) or Apple (school) product" or something
| like that.
| simonh wrote:
| Wikipedia says between 12m and 17m were manufactured, in
| total.
|
| Trammel claimed 30m based on a remembered estimate of rough
| sales numbers per year, but the only estimate that's based on
| objective evidence - serial number analysis - is 12.5m.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20160306232450/http://www.pageta.
| ..
| VLM wrote:
| Yeah interesting. Maybe the 30M figure comes from 6502
| shipments. I don't have the tab up anymore that was
| claiming 30M+ shipments.
|
| Here's an interesting discussion link. Merely being on
| wikipedia doesn't mean its correct that site is a hive of
| disinfo in general:
|
| https://www.pagetable.com/?p=547
|
| This site even mentions the peculiar 30M figure.
|
| I would tend to believe the linked site's serial number
| analysis result of exactly 12.5M. The americans did
| something like that to the germans in WWII, it turns out a
| remarkably small totally random sample of sequentially
| assigned serial numbers is enough to very accurately
| predict the highest number sold. Assuming very random
| sampling, which is never truly random, of course.
|
| Doesn't change the overall outcome, however, when there's a
| stat that a small segment of an industry is "about" the
| size of what's claimed to be the entire industry,
| something's off in the numbers.
|
| A mere 12.5M sold remains 5% of the entire USA population
| at that time, and honestly, having been there, almost
| everyone I knew had a PC clone or some apple product,
| usually a mac. The number must be larger than 10%. "a
| computer" was required at college ... ed.gov claims there
| are 19.4 M college students in the USA right now and google
| claims 332M people in the USA right now, so about 6% of the
| population are in college right now, so back in 1990 guess
| "around" 6% of the population was required to own a
| computer just to attend higher ed ... the claimed 10% seems
| like an incredibly low number.
| randallsquared wrote:
| > _" a computer" was required at college_
|
| In 1990? No way. I was taking college courses (for HS
| credit) in 1990, and the first I heard of a requirement
| to bring your own computer was years after that.
|
| Another thing that skews the numbers is that my household
| during the 80s had two Color Computers, a C64, and an
| Amiga 500, but no one else in my social circle had
| anything more general than a Nintendo or Atari console.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I was in college in the latter half of 1980s. Computers
| were very much in use at the time for writing papers, and
| some classes required them for other work. Students were
| not expected to actually own one, however -- they would
| go to labs around campus which were basially just rooms
| full of PCs loaded up with all the common software.
|
| Computer Science courses generally just required a remote
| dumb terminal, such as a VT100 or ADM 3a. These were
| available in a few rooms around campus as well.
| ghaff wrote:
| I went to grad school for business in the mid-80s. I had
| a computer but I doubt there were more than a handful of
| other people in my class who had one. While I was there
| they went from a very limited computer lab in the
| basement with a few Macs, a Lisa!, and some DEC terminals
| to a much bigger lab of 286s off the library.
| simonh wrote:
| I graduated in 1990 and owning a personal computer
| capable of running a C or Pascal compiler useful for
| academic work was an impossible dream. I was lucky enough
| to have an Amiga, but a C compiler such as Aztec C cost
| serious money back then. Open source existed but GCC
| started out on Vax and even by 1990 I think it only ran
| on very expensive systems like Unix minis and
| workstations.
| NateLawson wrote:
| As late as the mid-90s in California, some kids showed up
| at university without a computer. There were PC and Mac
| labs on campus that were open pretty late, as well as
| VT100 terminal labs open 24/7 (though these were only
| used by most students to check email between classes and
| were on the way out).
|
| All engineering students had a computer, though.
| Transfinity wrote:
| Maybe. 15% sounds about right to me. Back in 1990 computers
| were expensive, bulky devices, required specialized knowledge
| to operate (Apple's ad copy notwithstanding), and had limited
| use outside of a few specific domains.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Call-out: we're also talking about mostly _un-_ networked
| computers here.
|
| 1989 is the very beginning of "the Internet might be useful
| for general purposes by non-scientists." And incidentally,
| the same year BGP was dreamed up. https://en.m.wikipedia.or
| g/wiki/The_World_(internet_service_...
|
| So most computers were running boxed retail software with
| extremely limited hard drive data space (if present at
| all).
| netsharc wrote:
| Kinda amazing that nowadays anyone can go to a store and
| get a "super" computer that fits in their pockets in the
| form of a smartphone. Want to video call someone across the
| world? Buy one of those, setup an account for the
| Apple/Google store (yay walled garden), install WhatsApp or
| your messenger of choice, and ring ring!
|
| Funny how many of the ads say "Call us for more information
| about our offerings!" instead of a "For more info:
| www....".
| tingletech wrote:
| when I went to school, each school usually had only one or 2
| apple ][s -- but we had a whole classroom of PETs in 7th
| grade that got replaced by a classroom of C64 in 8th grade. I
| saved up and bought a TRS-80 CoCo 2, otherwise there would
| not have been a computer in our house.
| MiddleEndian wrote:
| Anecdotally, I remember being excited for my dad to get a
| computer around 1994 or 1995, and it was a Mac IIci. A bunch of
| people I know got computers around then or within the next
| couple years, but before that it wasn't much of a thing. One of
| my earliest computer memories was using ClarisWorks Paint and
| spending (what seemed like) hours drawing a scarecrow while my
| parents watched, and then the computer crashed and it was all
| lost.
|
| My mom had a word processor around then as well (can't remember
| which came first), a single purpose device for writing with a
| keyboard, a CRT monitor, and a printer. Looked somewhat like
| this[0] but I can't remember whether it was the same brand or
| not.
|
| 0. https://i.imgur.com/Wx6eKZE.jpeg
| sircastor wrote:
| I remember painting abstract primate pictures with MacPaint
| when I was quite young. I was sad when we got the new
| computer because I think MacPaint didn't make the transition
| to system 7 or something, and my dad told me we couldn't open
| the files.
|
| We also had a IIci. It came out I'm 89, and I was shocked to
| learn how insanely expensive it was at launch - $6000... $14k
| adjusted for inflation.
| sircastor wrote:
| We had a computer at home when I was a kid and in retrospect I
| was surprised to realize how unusual that was. I imagine it
| gave me far more advantage than I think.
| bane wrote:
| Sometime in the mid-90s the local Microcenter had a deal on a
| $999 PC. IIR it was running Windows-95, but was otherwise a
| bare-minimum system. The "deal" was that the PC also had an ad
| infested border around the screen that ate up some non-trivial
| amount of the screen space.
|
| The line to buy it would through nearly every aisle in the
| store, out the front door and down the block, for over a
| _week_. People were asking for forwards on their paychecks,
| taking out loans, selling cars, anything they could do to get a
| computer at this magic price point.
|
| The main selling point? It had a modem and people could see
| what this "internet" business was all about for the first time.
| maestroia wrote:
| "By the time the 1980s came to an end, it was unusual for a
| household to be without a personal computer."
|
| As someone who graduated college when the 1980s came to an end, I
| can say it was unusual for a household to HAVE a computer. They
| were a major purchase, any communication with the outside world
| was via dial-up modem to a BBS, and most families had no
| practical reason for them.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| There are several anachronistic mistakes in this article. I
| think the author is perhaps too young to have lived in those
| times.
| dwighttk wrote:
| Man for me it was realizing my phone has ~ 200x the flops of the
| Cray XMP from Jurassic Park.
| gregors wrote:
| They're playing 1 on 1. I loved breaking the backboard
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBluMt9taF4
| VLM wrote:
| The article focuses almost entirely on hardware especially
| hardware prices.
|
| Then there's the usual confusion about inflation. In a
| theoretical sense a $3K hard drive would be like spending $9K
| now, but with massive economic decline and income inequality the
| real comparison is in the 80s families could scare up $3K if they
| really wanted, but now people can only afford $1K phones with
| exotic high interest rate financing, so people were either three
| times richer back then or nine times richer back then. Either way
| times are not good now. The point of an ad for a $3K hard drive
| from the 80s is not that it would in some theoretical sense cost
| $9K now or would store a million times as much data now, but that
| short decades ago people could afford to spend $3K and now
| they're stressed at spending merely $300. Another few decades of
| permanent economic decline and we as a people will be stressed at
| spending only $30.
|
| Most of the consumer-level ads try to link their product with
| success and intelligence, whereas all advertisements now focus on
| competitively showing off your former wealth or some variation on
| "We are woke so our products must be good" LOL. Tech ads in 2022
| look a lot more like mechanical gold watch ads in the 70s or
| designer jeans ads from the 80s.
|
| The other point missed in the article is computer mags from my
| youth were absolutely chock full of software advertisements for
| $1000 compilers and $500 word processor and spreadsheet software.
| When I was a little kid a nice C compiler cost about half my
| dad's car, then as a teen you could get a decent K+R compatible
| compiler for a hundred bucks from radio shack (I paid 50 on sale
| using money I saved) and as a young adult, development tools are
| all free and you download linux and emacs and start writing code
| for the cost of some bbs download time, and later internet
| download time. Most of the software that we take for granted as
| being free today in 2022 used to sell for at least hundreds of
| dollars in the 80s and at least $50 in the early 90s, then the
| internet hit and you just download gcc "for free".
| pixl97 wrote:
| Eh, your economics have some issues here. Back then people were
| extremely stressed about spending that much. At least where I
| lived people could not spend that much, and a lot of computers
| that were bought were with financing.
|
| On of the big things that has changed is the massive increase
| in housing costs and rents causing all kinds of economic
| issues.
| beezle wrote:
| My mid-80s starting salary out of college with a BA was $25K -
| pretty good at the time and order $70K today. That $3K in the
| 80s would be 1/8th of my annual salary. Most people would
| consider that a very large expenditure and not something they
| could find digging under the couch cushions and breaking piggy
| banks.
| VLM wrote:
| I don't disagree with any of that, none the less, they were
| selling at $3K then and have to cut price to $300 to sell
| now, so people are obviously 10x poorer now than in the 80s.
| Can't argue with actual historical economic activity.
|
| Its worth pointing out that I was paying something ridiculous
| like $115 for health insurance around 1990 and its running
| about $1750 now for my wife and I, and that's with horrifying
| copays and stuff. Somebody with $70K is still getting $70K,
| they're just spending it on rent and medical expenses now
| instead of $3K hard drives.
|
| On one hand, instead of life involving $3K hard drives, now
| we supposedly have better medical care and nicer houses. On
| the other hand, its not like lifespans are increasing, LOL.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > they were selling at $3K then and have to cut price to
| $300 to sell now, so people are obviously 10x poorer now
| than in the 80s
|
| Can you explain this? I don't understand your reasoning.
| Doesn't the issue of "cheaper to manufacture" have anything
| to do with price?
| notahacker wrote:
| It's entirely due to cost of manufacture (and the result
| that hard drives are mass market product with a lot of
| competiton)
|
| Here's a brand new sedan you could buy for under $5k
| during the same period.
| https://blog.consumerguide.com/wp-
| content/uploads/sites/2/20...
|
| The sort of person that could afford to plonk $3k a few
| megabytes of storage without thinking about it too hard
| back then wasn't the sort of person that needs a payment
| plan to afford an iPhone today, it's the sort of person
| who's never needed to save for a new car.
| [deleted]
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| What I remember of those early computer ads is they showed a
| smiling family all gathered around a computer, joining in with
| some wholesome activity.
|
| Firstly, _that_ never happened. The moment my ZX81 came into
| our house there were nightly fights for the television (early
| computers needed the telly as a display). The computer
| completely alienated my parents and siblings who were mainly
| grateful that my interest in electronics and hacking was a
| pacifier.
|
| Secondly, the distance between those images of technology as a
| _connecting_ force and today 's reality could hardly be more
| striking. Personal computers are objects of radical
| individualism. Four member of the family each staring into
| their own 6 inch digital world, face lit from below in blueish
| light would be the right image.
|
| So the question of "how far we've come" is more nuanced than
| kilobytes of RAM and megahertz of processing power.
| VLM wrote:
| > showed a smiling family all gathered around a computer
|
| They were always so dressed up, like they were planning on
| attending a wedding and at the last minute decided to play
| Donkey Kong.
|
| The real world looks as it always did, as I sit here
| "computing" in my gym shorts and a dirty tee shirt from
| changing the lawnmower oil this morning.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > were planning on attending a wedding and at the last
| minute decided to play Donkey Kong.
|
| lol. sweet.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Coincidentally I just watched a 90 second clip from The
| Brady Bunch. I'd forgotten how formally everyone dressed on
| TV ... even in their own homes with no guests visiting. The
| father is wearing slacks and a tie. The girls wear dresses.
| Not realistic.
| ghaff wrote:
| Depending on, for lack of a better word, class people did
| dress up more in general. My father didn't have a tie on
| at home. But we did dress up _way_ more than today when
| we went out--and especially if we were traveling by air
| or going to a restaurant.
|
| In business, I was just joking the other week that, in
| the course of my career, we've gone from business suits
| being the expected attire at industry events to jeans
| with T-shirts at least being perfectly acceptable.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| Not going to make an argument for the realism of The
| Brady Bunch, but people did certainly dress more formally
| in previous decades.
|
| At my first job bagging groceries and stocking shelves,
| we wore a dress shirt and a tie.
|
| At my first corporate software job, it was only a year or
| two past the time they had to wear a suit and tie to
| work. By the end of the 90's people went to work at a
| corporate job dressed the way I dressed at the beginning
| of the 90's to go skateboarding.
| samatman wrote:
| One of my earlier memories was sitting on my Dad's lap
| playing some Infocom game on his brand-new PC-AT. I didn't
| get to go into the study that much so it was big deal.
|
| I still have the F series keyboard from that computer, which
| ended up housing my first three motherboards as well.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > sitting on my Dad's lap playing some Infocom game
|
| That's heartening. I'm also trying to do a good job as a
| dad, letting my daughter have positive experiences with
| computers, to learn to have fun, respect but also command
| them, to be in control.
| maestroia wrote:
| It sounds like we're roughly the same age, so I won't go
| completely into "get off my lawn" mode. But most families in
| the 80s could not scare up $3K easily, it was a boatload of
| money; and if they could, it was for emergencies.
|
| It's easy to remember our youth, and think of how easy it was.
| And it may have been for us (well, I was working or in college
| most of the 80s), but not our parents who foot the bills.
| neilv wrote:
| The optimism around computers in the 1980s is a noteworthy
| juxtaposition with that site itself. Given the impressively large
| number of different commercial surveillance companies to which
| that site is selling out everyone.
| aaron695 wrote:
| black_13 wrote:
| reactjavascript wrote:
| The technology has progressed. But have _humans_ progressed?
| tomcam wrote:
| Hell yes! Back then here in the USA we had only 2 sexes, 3 TV
| networks, and all libraries had were these printed website
| things they called "books".
|
| Nowadays we have 57 sexes, 570 TV networks, and libraries in
| the city have evolved to their true purpose of sheltering the
| unhoused. And soon we won't be burdened by our privacy
| belongings!
|
| https://twitter.com/wef/status/800965291215818752?s=21
|
| I mean, who wouldn't see this as leveling up?
| agumonkey wrote:
| all i see is diminishing returns, marketing and fantasies.
|
| 4MB used to make people believe they'd do everything for life,
| accounting, programming, graphics whatever. It was infinite joy
| with only 320x200 points.
|
| Now you sell a 4k capable pocket datacenter running on 5W and
| people are barely satisfied for a year.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| TBF the pocket datacenter does way more than a vintage does
| though. However I do agree there is an inflation of customer
| expectation since the 90s.
|
| Just imagine: assuming tech evolves a lot slower. What would
| happen? People would still be OK, games would still be fun,
| business would carry on regardless.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Imagine never having sweets in your life, then the first time
| you having a peppermint your life would be changed.
|
| Now imagine a long life where you had all the sweets you
| could ever eat available all the time. Your attitude to them
| is going to be far different.
|
| In addition, back in the 90s computers were going to attract
| 'computer people' and the rest would ignore them. Now they
| are just a fact of life, even for the disinterested.
| [deleted]
| stevenjgarner wrote:
| Involved in the industry since 1980, I am intrigued looking
| back how we just reinvent the same things but with different
| distractions - I'm thinking of things like the "natural
| language" program Savvy from Excalibur Technologies running on
| an Apple II with a CPM card back in 1982 (which I cannot even
| find referenced online), then the whole computer world got
| thoroughly distracted with the graphical user interface for a
| few decades (macOS, Windows) but with applications that hardly
| even matched the capability of Savvy. Savvy and programs with
| that level of functionality simply disappeared. Then the world
| got distracted with smart phones (iOS, Android), with apps
| really nothing more than portals through to large datacenter
| applications still with capabilities that hardly matched the
| capability of Savvy. I guess in a few decades we'll be
| distracted with Ray Kurzweil-esque red blood cell sized
| computers swimming in our blood (still with capabilities that
| will hardly match the capabilities of Savvy). It's as if humans
| really do not want functionality and capability as much as we
| want accessibility?
| bradneuberg wrote:
| So great to hear Savvy mentioned! What an amazing piece of
| software.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Can you explain what was Savvy please? I had an Apple 2e
| and do not remember Savvy at all.
| eesmith wrote:
| > which I cannot even find referenced online
|
| For these sorts of searches, I use archive.org: https://archi
| ve.org/search.php?query=Savvy++%22Excalibur+Tec...
|
| Perhaps https://archive.org/details/InterfaceAge198207/page/n
| 111/mod... ?
|
| Pipes (the tobacco kind, not the Unix kind) used to be a lot
| more popular back then.
|
| Edit: Dr. Dobb's review at
| https://archive.org/details/1985-03-dr-dobbs-
| journal/page/11... . Says SAVVY PC was written in MMS Forth
| "this despite John Dvorak's statment in his _InfoWorld_
| column, "Inside Track," that no decent program was ever
| written in Forth". :)
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| I've said this before but the further back you go, the further
| above average you needed to be or you couldn't even even touch
| a computer.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Yes and no. Big wins include the fact that smoking isn't
| _everywhere_ the way it used to be, gay marriage and rights,
| more freedom for women, and generally lower costs for essential
| - albeit with some serious downsides for those involved in
| making and distributing them.
|
| Losses include much less economic headroom for everyone who
| isn't upper middle class or higher, with a fair percentage of
| the population falling out at the low end, much more
| homelessness, and a cutthroat nickel and dime everything
| neoliberal culture in business. So while computers and cars are
| cheaper, health care and college expenses are much higher.
|
| There was still some lingering benign paternalism in business
| in the 80s and especially the 70s, but that's much rarer now.
|
| And serious stressors like climate catastrophe are much more
| imminent.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| That's a good summary. One nit: are cars really cheaper now?
| I don't get that impression. They are definitely more
| reliable, though, and last much longer.
| musicale wrote:
| > So while computers and cars are cheaper, health care and
| college expenses are much higher.
|
| Technology, transportation, and food are cheaper.
|
| Unfortunately major essentials such as housing, health care,
| and education are drastically more expensive.
|
| Outside of cartels and rent-seekers, I can't imagine people
| saying "you know, we really need to make housing, health
| care, and education unaffordable for more people."
|
| It's particularly disappointing that technology doesn't seem
| to have reduced the cost of health care or education - the
| cartels seem to have won by restricting supply and exploiting
| indirect payment systems.
| jkmcf wrote:
| Bird vs Johnson/Jordan, possibly what is in that picture, is one
| of my all time favorite games.
| jdkee wrote:
| Also one of my favorite Atari 800 games, Dr. J and Larry Bird
| Go One-on-One.
|
| See https://www.giantbomb.com/dr-j-and-larry-bird-go-one-on-
| one/...
| russellbeattie wrote:
| Who still has their first computer? My TRS-80 Color Computer 2 is
| sitting quietly in my garage, in a box that contains it, the TV
| adapter, the Color Basic manuals, a Radio Shack joystick and a
| half dozen cassette tapes with programs I wrote as an 10yo in
| 1982.
|
| If anyone at the Computer History Museum reads this: Get the
| 70s/80s micro computers out from behind the display cases!!! CHM
| has at least one of every computer you can think of, why not take
| the extras and put them on the floor for visitors to play with?
| It's like torture wandering through the displays and not being
| able to _play_ with all those computers and video games you
| lusted over as a kid.
| indymike wrote:
| I have a couple TI-994a's and a C64 out in the garage that were
| given to me as gifts... not the original (that died a long time
| ago).
|
| I learned to program on the TI, TI-BASIC first, then Extended
| Basic, then some Assembler. The C64 was great because you had
| to understand how to work directly with hardware. On the TI,
| you would nice library call like CALL SOUND. On the C64 you'd
| have to POKE everything to the correct address to coax sound
| out of it (often what you would do in a single line on the TI
| would take 4-5 lines on the C64, but the C64 was fast, and had
| lots of memory). Good times.
| samatman wrote:
| I still have my first keyboard, an IBM Model F. The PC-AT which
| went with it was Ship of Theseuse'd into the late 486 era, I
| abandoned it when tower cases became standard.
| deathanatos wrote:
| I'm a bit younger than a TRS-80, but yes, I do. It's at my
| parent's house. A 1989 Compaq Deskpro running OS/2. AFAIK, it
| still runs.
| lakkal wrote:
| My Atari 800 died in a lightning storm in 1983, but I still
| have the replacement 800XL downstairs, with floppy drives,
| cassette drive, thermal printer, and 300 baud modem. An Ape
| Face paralell port adapeer for the Epson RX-80, which I don't
| have anymore. Lots of floppies and cartridges, too. And JForth
| along with the manual.
| ezconnect wrote:
| That was my little boy dream, to play the Bird vs Magic
| basketball video game. I had an Atari 2600 back then and was
| buying used computer magazine and when that was released it
| looked amazing compared to the stick figure basketball on the
| 2600
| antiterra wrote:
| It was Dr. J vs Bird, and it felt slow and clunky at the time,
| but yes, miles better than anything on the Atari 2600.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_on_One:_Dr._J_vs._Larry_Bi...
| ozzythecat wrote:
| This article makes me nostalgic. Sometime in 1994 or 1995, my
| immigrant dad bought us a Packard Bell machine. He couldn't
| afford it, and I'm not sure what drove him to make the purchase.
| I do know he used a credit card, couldn't make the payments, and
| it was one of a few purchases that destroyed his credit.
|
| This thing sat in its cardboard packaging for at least 6-9
| months. My dad had no idea how to set it up, and his English
| wasn't good enough to just read the manual I guess. When I was in
| first grade, one of my dads friends came over and helped my dad
| set it up. They installed AOL. My dad gave my older sibling the
| password but wouldn't share tell me.
|
| The first time I used the computer, I spent a good hour I think
| staring at Mighty Morphin Power Rangers content on the "Kids
| Only" AOL channel.
|
| This literally changed my life. I learned HTML when I was in the
| 3rd grade. The next year, I learned PHP because all of the cool
| Quake 3 clans had web pages where you could post updates without
| having to change HTML and re upload files over FTP. By 5th grade,
| all the cool people on IRC (Dalnet or EFNet I think) were talking
| about object oriented PHP.
|
| I learned how to write objects in PHP, although OOP didn't really
| make sense to me. I remember using some library to add my Quake 3
| clan's logo as a watermark on images I would upload to our
| website.
|
| As a kid growing up in the 1990s with both of my parents being
| alive then, it was truly a different time. I believed I could
| accomplish just about anything. By 1999/2000, I knew I'd wanted
| to do something with computers when I grew up. By 2001/2002, I
| was poking around in Java a bit. Unfortunately I didn't really
| learn much computer science until college. And I didn't really
| appreciate data structures and design until really starting my
| career.
|
| Sometimes I do wonder how things could have been different if I
| was born in the 70s or 80s.
| johnohara wrote:
| The oldest and most mind-boggling process ever devised and
| foisted upon readers lies at the bottom of many of those ads --
| "circle ### on reader service card."
|
| It was a cruel joke for the ad to spark your interest whereby you
| would circle the number, mail in the bingo card to the publisher
| (3-5 days), whose lead management group would process it (3-5
| days), then send the lead to the company or dealer (3-5 days),
| who would assign it to a sales rep (3-5 days), who was working
| their leads and getting back to potential customers (3-5 days),
| who would then ignore the call because they had lost interest in
| the product or couldn't remember requesting information.
|
| Compare that with today where making a phone call to the sales
| team takes too long (3-5 minutes) and it's easier to just go get
| the damn information yourself.
| MarcoZavala wrote:
| codevark wrote:
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| Pixel art actually displayed nicer on CRT monitors, and DOS
| interfaces were pretty fast and keyboard optimized, and there
| wasn't an industry dedicated to spying on you. So not always for
| the better.
| marcodiego wrote:
| These ads show not only how much we progressed in terms of
| technology but also as being a society with less prejudice and
| misogyny. Take a look at the role of women on those photos.
| Disgusting!
| lstodd wrote:
| Too bad they missed this one
|
| https://i.pinimg.com/originals/e6/37/b1/e637b1345d6f13bd14c6...
| dxhdr wrote:
| Women showing their kids new tech, truly disgusting.
|
| I was actually surprised there were only two photos of "pinup"
| type girls... and then shortly later, a photo of a naked dude!
| And then a businesswoman "walking into the light" carrying a
| PC! I guess I was expecting much worse.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| We are afraid of heterosexual family units and the female
| body now.
| marcodiego wrote:
| Yes, there are those exceptions. In most cases the woman is
| shown as someone whose only function is to take care of the
| kids while the man is the one with the job to take care of
| the family; the first picture shows exactly that.
|
| The photo of the naked dude is not exploiting his appearance.
| The photo of the business woman may be interpreted as
| something like "even a woman can carry it."
| mgdlbp wrote:
| What, then, of these IBM commercials?
|
| "PS/2 It!" (1989)
| https://archive.org/details/ibmpersonalsystem2ps2computercom...
|
| "We're Your Type" (1984/6?)
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ce3NYMG_qoA
|
| "The IBM Retail Solution" (1983)
| https://digital.hagley.org/FILM_2018222_FC229_01
|
| I mean, I guess that's the entire point of the second one's
| message, but IBM seems to have been pretty consistent with the
| diversity around then.
|
| --
|
| Edit: The collection behind that last one
| (https://digital.hagley.org/2018222) is full of short
| documentaries about employment that are similarly interesting,
| e.g.:
|
| "Understanding Norms:" (1970s)
| https://digital.hagley.org/FILM_2018222_FC53
|
| "Office Practice : Business Manners and Customs" (1972 )
| https://digital.hagley.org/FILM_2018222_FC164
|
| "People to People" (1974)
| https://digital.hagley.org/FILM_2018222_FC169
|
| "Jobs in the World of Work : A Good Place To Be" (1969)
| https://digital.hagley.org/FILM_2018222_FC175
| pcrh wrote:
| And a naked man as well!
| ajross wrote:
| That's what I find striking too. Likewise there's precisely one
| photo in the entire collection showing a non-white face (and
| it's a school room of kids, not "customers"). I remember
| reading these ads; it wasn't that long ago at all.
| felix318 wrote:
| Conversely people looking at current adverts 50 years from
| now will wonder "where did all the white people go?"
|
| (I'm not white and I don't care, it's just an observation)
| ajross wrote:
| The US non-hispanic white population is about 60%. I'd be
| absolutely stunned if there was a study somewhere showing
| white representation in a reasonably defined advertising
| market under that number. Is that really a serious opinion
| you've formed? I have to wonder where it came from?
| [deleted]
| egypturnash wrote:
| I dunno, they're still _there_ , they're just not the
| _only_ people?
| teakettle42 wrote:
| I visited an indoor mall recently, in an area with some
| of the whitest demographics in the nation, but also
| (since I know the stereotypes about fat Americans) the
| healthiest.
|
| Almost without exception, the models depicted in the
| store window ads were obese women of color. Even for
| athletic wear.
|
| Whatever weird fetishism the marketing world has going on
| now, it's absolutely not representative relative to local
| demographics, nor nation-wide demographics.
| ajross wrote:
| > Almost without exception, the models depicted in the
| store window ads were obese women of color.
|
| Obviously I can't speak to whatever local ads you saw,
| but I don't believe the "almost without exception" for an
| instant. Here's the front page of Forever 21, sort of a
| reasonable approximation to an "indoor mall" environment:
| https://www.forever21.com/
|
| Out of 55 models with faces that I see, 27 are white (or
| at least plausibly white-presenting, obviously there's
| some ambiguity here as there always is with any kind of
| ethnic definition).
|
| So... 50% almost exactly. A bit lower than the population
| at large (though probably much closer to the
| younger/urban target market). Hardly a lack of
| representation, which is what you claim to be seeing. But
| my guess is that absent these numbers, you'd look at that
| page and think "almost without exception..." right?
| teakettle42 wrote:
| No, that looks relatively representative to me, modulo
| minor variance, and even the "plus sized" models aren't
| on the extreme end of obesity.
|
| I'm even impressed that there's asian representation;
| they're generally grossly under-represented.
|
| (Also, I feel like I've been trolled into looking at
| Forever 21's website).
|
| You don't have to believe me, but I'm also not going to
| go through the mall recording exactly what percentage of
| stores featured extremely obese women of color as their
| front-and-center spokesmodel.
| alkaloid wrote:
| I'm so grateful my father (RIP) came home with a Commodore VIC-20
| from Sears in 1983.
|
| We were incredibly poor, so my mother nearly killed him, but he
| insisted that personal computers were here to stay, and that his
| children needed to become acquainted.
|
| Nearly 40 years later, he was right. I have made, and continue to
| make, a great living on these crazy machines.
| cgh wrote:
| Same, except it was a C64. Many happy days and nights spent
| learning BASIC and later 6502 assembly with 3 metres of snow on
| the ground outside and pitch black by 3:30 pm.
| hereforphone wrote:
| You may want to double-check the definition of 'incredibly
| poor'.
| madengr wrote:
| The kid down the road from me in rural VA had no indoor
| plumbing, but had a VIC 20.
|
| I eventually got a C64, but that was after my dad brought
| home a IBM PC for a few months to do chemical calculations in
| a spreadsheet. He said it was revolutionary that he could put
| this machine on the factory floor reactor and develop plug-
| in-chug calculations for reactions.
|
| He also contracted a local EE to develop a CNC marine buoy
| winding machine based on the PC. I remember talking to the
| guy as a kid and he said it was compiled BASIC. It interfaced
| to the gantry motors and servo system via a giant, custom
| control board he made.
| mlom wrote:
| i have a similar story about a 486 from the 90s. i have a lot
| of skills now and can do things many other people cannot,
| include make a lot of money if i want. but look around you, and
| ask, how does your personal wealth in this industry, which
| people are now forced to participate in to access basic life
| needs like food and transportation and social services,
| represent "progress" for anyone but you? are our operating
| systems secure? do they respect our privacy? or are we being
| spied on and stolen from by an increasingly ubiquitous industry
| with no conscience or self awareness?
| [deleted]
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _or are we being spied on and stolen from by an
| increasingly ubiquitous industry with no conscience or self
| awareness?_
|
| It sounds like you're equating "tech industry" with Big
| Tech1, but the tech industry is not an evil monolith. Even
| Alphabet is not an evil monolith, Apple is a radically
| different beast than Meta, etc.
|
| If you've decided that working in tech is default evil, you
| could choose a political path focused on breaking up and
| regulating Big Tech. But there are also plenty of good people
| leveraging tech for good, too.
|
| 1a.k.a. "MANAMANA": Microsoft, Apple, Netflix, Alphabet,
| Meta, Amazon, Nvidia, and Adobe
| mlom wrote:
| greed is evil, and i see you all every day getting paid to
| fuck up our world. i see you online and i see you in person
| when you try to spend your money on me and services i
| provide. you have not succeeded in distinguishing yourself,
| you are all members of a technocratic class enriching
| itself at the expense of our environmental resources.
| jgerrish wrote:
| how does your personal wealth in this industry
|
| The Living Computer Museum in Seattle is closing down. Paul
| Allen's estate, who gave so much money and built several
| Seattle organizations, seems to be focusing money elsewhere.
|
| Like Bill Gates philanthropy, I assume they believe focusing
| resources towards vaccines and other general population
| philanthropic investments is more important.
|
| The Living Computer Museum was unique. I remember especially
| they had a room set up like an old 80s living room with an
| Atari VCS 2600, and a window looking outside. It wasn't
| important in the sense of "progress", but it provided a
| shared historical perspective.
|
| I hope whatever takes its place is cool.
|
| I'm tired of moving.
| mlom wrote:
| bill gates promoted one of the most brutal and polluting
| industries in the world, a complete environmental disaster
| rooted in slavery, with the phrase "a PC on every desk". he
| created a horrible and bloated ecosystem that has plagued
| our lives and he has just attempted to do the same with an
| insane biosecurity apparatus. i never want to hear any of
| these people's opinions on vaccines or anything like this
| again. they are dangerous worthless frauds. philanthropy is
| just what gates turned to after he got chased out of his
| own business for sexual harassment.
| digisign wrote:
| Why is it closing down? I see it _has been_ closed due to
| covid, but most places are now open with a few minor
| restrictions.
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| I have pretty much the same story.
| haolez wrote:
| Same here. Got my 386 in 1994 (in Brazil nonetheless!).
| [deleted]
| jhgb wrote:
| We were not incredibly poor, although we probably would have
| been considered as such by US standards (which I'm sure were
| quite different at the time from Czechoslovak standards). We
| _did_ have to smuggle our C64 over the Iron Curtain though, so
| I hope that this counts as something.
| thrtythreeforty wrote:
| Stories like this fascinate me. (I've lived in the US my
| entire life so it's just completely foreign to my worldview.)
| What was logistically involved in getting ahold of one? And
| what were the "legal" alternatives?
| jhgb wrote:
| > What was logistically involved in getting ahold of one?
|
| Having a grandfather who left the country in 1968 for West
| Germany gifting me one when we visited him.
|
| > And what were the "legal" alternatives?
|
| Buying one at an outrageous markup in an exclusive shop. I
| don't remember the exact number (although I could find it
| out) but the price tag was something like five month of
| average Czechoslovak wages at the time. Apparently in the
| US the equivalent would have been paying $10000 for one (in
| 1988, mind you). Of course in Germany it cost something
| like 299 DM or so...
| yawn wrote:
| Similar story. Learned Logo at school on a Vic-20. Loved it so
| much I taught myself Basic at Kmart by grabbing the Basic
| User's Guide off the shelf and typing stuff into one of the
| C64s on the display case. It impressed my dad so much he put
| one on layaway. Been programming ever since.
| protomyth wrote:
| Yep, we traded in our Atari VCS (2600) with 23 cartridges for
| an Atari 400 and two game cartridges (Missile Command and Pac-
| Man). He spent money that was in short supply to buy a 410
| (tape recorder) and the BASIC cartridge. We learned to program
| and that made all of the difference years on.
|
| There was a small slice of time where consumer, programmable
| computers were affordable to a large audience in the 80's and
| very early 90's. Adding to that era was the magazines that
| provided amazing content such as programs and news. Antic,
| Byte, Creative Computing, and Dr. Dobbs were the building
| blocks.
| biztos wrote:
| What I really loved about those magazines, living in a small
| town, was how they simultaneously showed you the variety of
| what was out there, mostly through the small ads, and the
| speculative future of the technology through the articles,
| while also giving a kid the ability to grow their skills
| Right Now in the form of printed-out programs.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| Lucky you! I had the BASIC cartdrige for the... Atari 2600.
| It'd come with a joystick in two split halves which, if I
| remember correctly, you had to plug in the joystick ports (so
| one in each port). My memory may be failing me for it was a
| _very_ long time ago. I still fondly remember the first lines
| I drew, in colors, using BASIC. One of my very first program.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| I had BASIC for the Atari 2600 (called Atari VCS at the
| time). It came with two controllers that had membrane
| keyboards. There were not enough keys for the alphabet so
| you had to use key modifiers to type the full A-Z and 0-9
| character set. It was immensely tedious and really a bummer
| to use. I'm surprised you got far enough to do graphics
| with it. I dont recall being able to do anything except
| every simple text-based things like:
|
| 10 print "hello"
|
| 20 goto 10
| flomo wrote:
| IIRC it didn't even have strings, but it did have drawing
| commands.
| IMSAI8080 wrote:
| BBC Micro for me round these parts but same idea. The 80s
| were a golden age for bedroom coders and the various 8-bit
| machines round the world launched thousands of careers. The
| fact that the machines came with a programming language (and
| even booted straight into it) gave many cause to experiment.
| It faded out in the 90s when the concept of what a home
| computer was changed.
| synu wrote:
| Exact same computer, and we were poor too. I learned BASIC on
| it and basically never stopped coding since then. It's strange
| to think about how different my life might have been without
| that computer.
| btgeekboy wrote:
| We weren't well off either, but my dad was able to get a decent
| deal when our neighbor upgraded. It was put into my room for
| lack of space - and the rest is history.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| Same story here, but with a Tandy 100 RLX. We sold our Nintendo
| NES to help pay for it.
| hasbot wrote:
| I got into computers in high school around 1980. I used to read
| Byte magazine and studied every ad. So exciting! My senior year,
| after saving and saving my income from my $2.85/hour after school
| job I bought an Apple ][+ for around $2000.
| russellbeattie wrote:
| The craziest thing about Byte Magazine was that it was
| published in Peterborough, NH. I was friends with the editor's
| son in the early 90s... If you've ever been to that area of NH,
| you'd be amazed that a high tech magazine of Byte's stature was
| published there. I'd be surprised if the town even had decent
| broadband before the 2000s. Physically and culturally, it's
| about as far away from Silicon Valley (where I live now) as you
| can get.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| A really good place to see old computer ads in context is on
| magazine archives.
|
| Archive.org has the BYTE archives.
|
| https://archive.org/details/BYTE-MAGAZINE-COMPLETE
|
| It is fun to go back and browse them.
| transfire wrote:
| Magellan sounds better than what we have available now.
| cowmix wrote:
| It _was_. At the time (31 years ago) I was the magician in my
| office because I was, somehow, able to find any file on our
| Novell file server via a content search-- no matter what
| program originated it.
| CPLX wrote:
| It's definitely different.
|
| Progress is a value judgement.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| Victor Borge in his later years here in the Verbatim ad, was a
| European keyboard virtuoso who made his way in the US by adding a
| distinctive comedy element to his solo touring performances.
|
| So it's only approprate to have him as a spokesman sitting at a
| computer keyboard, with his document looking not much different
| than sheet music. And he looks like he is tickling the ivories
| there, sticking mainly to the black keys I see.
|
| Maybe a bit like Irving Berlin, who was the most popular
| songwriter for so many decades, and who _only_ played on the
| black keys.
|
| Interestingly, Berlin's personal Steinway is now in the
| Smithsonian since it is a one-of-a-kind chromatic piano where he
| could mechanically shift the musical key the black keys were
| tuned for.
|
| So he could get together with artists like Sinatra and play his
| tunes as originally written but in the singers' preferred key.
|
| Now Borge was actually quite improvisational for a clasical
| musician.
|
| He could get up there, introduce himself and play a number of 30
| to 60 second interludes, and get away with saying or merely
| acting like he hadn't made his mind up what full piece to play.
|
| Then there could be a little monologue for a while which was one
| good reason so many were there to see him, but regardless of how
| excellent that was, the elephant in the room since the beginning
| had always been the significant percentage of the crowd who
| wanted nothing but the music.
|
| Zappa had this too.
|
| Borge would flip up his coat-tails, move closer to the microphone
| and say in his European accent "Do you want to hear Great Music?
| Classics?"
|
| He then quickly extends his arms in the characteristic way for
| more freedom of movement, puts his hands on the keys, moves
| closer to the microphone again and says "Too bad!"
| t0mmyb0y wrote:
| moron4hire wrote:
| I first started working in web development in 2005. We had
| Pentium 4 servers, running at what would probably feel like 1ghz
| today (P4 had some pipeline problems), with probably a gig or 2
| of RAM, on-prem. Core count? No idea. I'm guessing 4 at the most,
| but it might have only been 2. We usually ran two servers, one
| for app server and one for databases, though there were
| frequently multiple apps and multiple databases on those servers.
| Such a machine probably cost around $3k at the time, (IDK, I'm
| just guessing. Also, inflation has been about 50% since then).
| Most of that cost was probably in disk arrays. I was working on
| GIS apps, so we had "a lot" of data at rest.
|
| We had dedicated DBAs and sys admins. Most of the difficulty in
| getting applications built was A) being young and not knowing
| what I was doing, B) communicating and getting approved
| configuration changes with the sys admins for whatever stupid
| thing we were being asked to do by bizdev, C) communicating and
| getting approved scheme changes in the database with the DBAs
| without having a local copy we could modify at will to test
| anything before going to staging.
|
| Today, I have my servers in the cloud. I'm given 2 cores at 1ghz
| with like 4gb of RAM. It's about $2k a year. Every year. Or in
| that ballpark. It's not a huge diff from 17 years ago.
|
| My laptop has 14 cores running at atleast 3.5ghz, with 64gb of
| RAM. Plus a massive GPU. It also cost about $2k. I work in VR so
| I spend that every two years.
|
| The server backends I build now are not significantly different
| than I ever did. The front ends are significantly more complex (I
| thought I was pretty hot shit making a 2D graphics API in JS out
| of absolutely positioned DIVs as "pixels" back then, before
| Canvas was a thing, and now I do full motion 3D in VR at 120hz).
|
| So IDK. I probably got some minor details wrong, I'm not going to
| look absolutely everything up. Take it for a rough approximation.
|
| One thing that strikes me is that, operationally, things are
| vastly different, but not necessarily easier. I don't have to get
| anyone to approve anything anymore, but that's mostly because I'm
| the one in charge now and I know what I'm doing now. Front end
| tooling has improved thanks to TypeScript, but that's also come
| with massive amounts of other complications because it still
| needs to be JS at the end of the day. NPM has made it easier to
| get and manage dependencies, but the creaking tower of
| transpilers and bundling tools has clawed a lot of those gains
| back.
|
| I used to be able to clone a repo, start visual studio, hit F5,
| and after about 45s for a full, first time rebuild, I'd be in the
| app. Now I need to restore dependencies, make sure all the build
| tools are at the right versions, make sure all the separate build
| tools are running in the right order and time. Sometimes it
| doesn't work, because it's not clear why TypeScript is using VS'
| outdated lib.d.ts files that install by default instead of the
| ones that are in my node_modules.
|
| It "works", but it's deeply dissatisfying. I can never tell if
| introducing a new project into the repo is going to break first-
| time setup. I'm able to do more on the project I have already
| setup, but seeing up new projects has gotten so difficult that I
| often find myself so mentally overwhelmed (disgust, avoidance,
| etc) that I just don't, I go back to working on the one project
| instead of trying something new.
|
| Don't know where I'm going with this, but there it be.
| alangibson wrote:
| Everytime I see prices of hard drives back in the day, I get a
| feeling that's a mixture of claustrophobia, despair and shock.
| 300bps wrote:
| It's all relative. My first hard drive was a Seagate ST-251 40
| MB MFM hard drive on my 10 MHz Intel 8088 CPU. It cost about
| $300 at the time and perpetually remained about 80% full.
|
| The last hard drive I bought was a Seagate Exos X18 18 TB Sata
| hard drive on my 3.6 GHz AMD Ryzen 7 3700X CPU. It cost about
| $300 and has perpetually remained about 80% full.
| hansel_der wrote:
| so true :D
| PopAlongKid wrote:
| My first hard drive was a PCs Limited (now known as Dell)
| "drive on a card" which was a competitor to the higher-priced
| 20MB HardCard (brand name as I recall). I'd have to go to
| another computer to try looking up the purchase price.
|
| There were hard drives mounted directly on an interface card,
| they would take up two slots, when five available slots max
| was pretty much standard.
| stevenjgarner wrote:
| I remember buying an external 5GB hard drive for $4,999 with
| the first ProTools system back in 1991 (which itself cost much
| more than that). I was more amazed at having that much capacity
| than I am now buying yet another 4TB drive from Walmart for
| less than $100.
| swayvil wrote:
| Our numbers certainly have increased. And everybody likes that.
| jmclnx wrote:
| I miss the days when everything was simple ASCII Text :)
| hansel_der wrote:
| thou beeing german, i still use the us-layout and avoid umlauts
| when dealing with computers. some deep habits
| gernb wrote:
| I always feel amazed when I see a large micro-SD card (1TB for
| example) and compare it to my Atari 800 which had three 16k ram
| cartridges, each larger than an iPhone Max. So this micro-SD card
| the size of my thumbnail is 67 million times the memory of one of
| those cartridges.
|
| http://www.vintagecomputer.net/atari/800/atari_800_48kRAM-10...
| IMSAI8080 wrote:
| And one SD card could probably hold every commercially released
| title for every machine ever released combined up until about
| the CD era started in the 90s.
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