I dug a bunch of old paperwork out of the back of my filing cabinet this morning to make room for the new paperwork generated while preparing my taxes. I found some amusing old receipts for computer purchases from the past. It seems that in April ’97 I paid $155 each for two 16MB RAM modules. Today the same vendor sells comparable memory for $159 for 4GB, i.e. 256 times as much capacity for the same price, ignoring inflation.
About a year later I bought an Apple PowerMac G3 with a 266MHz CPU for $2395. I think the receipt indicates that it had 32MB of RAM and a 6GB hard drive, as well as a Zip drive. Remember those? What a disaster. Everything that was bad about floppies, multiplied by 100, with the added bonus that when the drive failed, it destroyed the data that was currently in it and on any other disks you were foolish enough to insert on the assumption that it was the disk that had gone bad and not the drive itself. I found a slightly earlier receipt that said I was dumb enough to spend $389 for an external SCSI Zip drive. There’s another receipt for RAM that says I spent $49 for a 4MB video RAM module for the PowerMac.
The best historic document is the oldest, a receipt for my Mac IIci, purchased in late November of 1989 (i.e. about nine years before the G3 PowerMac). It was loaded with a whopping 80MB hard drive and 4MB of RAM, and sported a luxurious 13″ Apple-branded monitor with a Sony CRT. The receipt doesn’t mention it but I believe that the CPU clipped along at a speedy 25MHz. The total price, including a substantial academic discount, was a rather shocking $6378. At least I can say that I got a lot of use out of that computer.
By contrast, the Dell PC I purchased recently cost about $1600. It has 8GB of RAM (~2000 times that of the IIci), 750GB of disk space (~9000 times that of the IIci), came with a 23″ LCD, and has a 2.80GHz processor. The CPU not only runs at more than 100 times the clock frequency, but is a 64-bit processor with eight cores, so comparing the two is fairly silly. Just the graphics card has 1GB of RAM itself, or 256 times the entire memory of the IIci.
On the flip side, though, the IIci stands out in my memory of the procession of computers that have passed before me. It was the first Mac I owned with a color display. It was also the first computer I ever put a DSP card into: eventually I bought an Audiomedia II card for it from a young company named Digidesign. They hadn’t yet invented ProTools, but they did sell a great program called Turbosynth. Turbosynth let you build synthesizer patches by hooking together graphical modules, and could even synthesize the sound in real time if you had the Audiomedia II card. (Of course if you actually wanted to play the sound in a useful manner, you had to save a sample file and either play it on a hardware sampler or with a Digidesign SampleCell card.)
