The last 10 years ... o how computers evolved

Alexh22

Alexh22

Alexh22

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17 Jul 2010
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11
i spoke to my dad who used to sell computers around 9-10 years ago and i was astonished when he said it was £1 per MB for ram and hard drives :O

to build computers that max out crisis and such would have cost a fortune although in them days it would have been 8-bit crisis lol
 
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High end computers are still expensive. However it's not all about the size of the RAM, and the number of GHz. Raw speed and capacty on current silicone technology is coming to the max, but streamlining the clock cycles, or latency of the RAM etc is playing a muhc bigger part in advancement.
 
Actually top end stuff costs a lot more now than it ever did before. And I mean absolute bleeding edge stuff

Stuff like 6 c0res, SLI graphics, SSDs costs absolutely loads. 1k cpus are a new thing tbh. I think graphics cards used to be around 300-400 always but 300+ motherboards are a new thing

sid
 
Prices drop quite a lot also, bought my 8800 gtx when i was in my first year of uni for £400 ish, by the end of 3rd year i saw them on ebay for like 60/70 quid..
 
Hard drives hit the £1 = 1mb in the early-90's. Before that I paid about £130 for an 80mb hard drive for my Amiga. Or do you mean £1 - 1GB ? In which case, I feel old.
 
I remember my first (40meg) hard disk seeming huge and unfillable... after all, you pretty much only had text files and very lean code to fill it with, and even at full whack I could only type about 10k of text per hour. :)

But a lot of the games them were still entertaining. I still play some of them using various emulators LOL. In fact often I think the plots were just as good (sometimes better) back then. It's just the graphics that have got a lot prettier and the coding got a lot bulkier. :)

First time I saw a megabyte it was about the size of a filing cabinet. :D They still have some of them in an old closed-down computer centre in part of the building where I work. Funny to think we now have mobile phones with more processing power than mainframes that used to fill large rooms. :)
 
My first upgrade was for a Philips 286-12.5MHz PC, it had 640Kb Ram with 384kb extended memory. I bought an additional 1Mb for £70. The PC when new cost £900 similar to a mid range PC nowadays, it had MS Dos v5 and a basic windows system called Geo. Dos shell was the file explorer of choice. It also had a 40Mb hard disc and a floppy, 14" VGA monitor. It was a good home computer in 1991. I learnt a lot from computing with such small resources though.

andy
 
My First upgrade was for a 486 and it was an additional 4Mb of RAM. Thinking back I never found it odd that the internal hard drive had a smaller capacity than the discs I was putting into the CD drive. Or that to run Duke Nukem 3d I had to have a boot disc as the machine couldn't handle the game and the OS all at the same time.

Good times.
 
I bought a 20 gig HD about 10 years ago, whats that in mb 20,000, it didnt cost me £20,000, In about 93-4 I bought a 4mb sim for an Amiga accellerator for £90
 
sid said:
Actually top end stuff costs a lot more now than it ever did before. And I mean absolute bleeding edge stuff
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Then you're young, just check what PCs cost 20 years ago.

Thing which has increased is power consumption... and half of that because of inefficient benchmarketing PC lunacy.
 
yeah true. back in those years you didnt see all these quad cores and stupidly amazing machine pcs. but its so much these days tho now
 
an average computer is about half of the price, with the exception of some professional software and games everything else is about the same..
 
Scurra said:
My First upgrade was for a 486 and it was an additional 4Mb of RAM. Thinking back I never found it odd that the internal hard drive had a smaller capacity than the discs I was putting into the CD drive. Or that to run Duke Nukem 3d I had to have a boot disc as the machine couldn't handle the game and the OS all at the same time.

Good times.
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Oh yeah, I remember the days of creating boot disks and manually editing the config.sys and autoexec.bat to load the absolute minimum into the precious 640k of conventional memory just to get a DOS game to load :)

Fun times indeed :) I quite miss that really, modern computers and operating systems make you feel removed from the whole process.
 
I can still remember buying a switchable 16kb RAM cartridge for my Vic-20, would have been about £30.

In real terms that would buy you today:-

a 1.5TB Hard Drive.

or

4GB DDR3



My first £500 PC had a 2GB Hard drive and 32MB of RAM back in 1998, it was a cheap one for work.

How on earth I managed to run Windows in 32MB of RAM bewilders me, considering Windows 7 today allocates over a Gigabyte of RAM to itself.
 
I remember not being able to play TFC online because I didn't have the internet on my PC and my dad wouldn't let me install it on his.
 
sid said:
Actually top end stuff costs a lot more now than it ever did before. And I mean absolute bleeding edge stuff

Stuff like 6 c0res, SLI graphics, SSDs costs absolutely loads. 1k cpus are a new thing tbh. I think graphics cards used to be around 300-400 always but 300+ motherboards are a new thing

sid
Click to expand...

back in 1980-something, the atari 1040st was the first computer to break the $1000/mb mark.....when it was reduced to $999. the atari mega 4, their top end machine with a color display, was $2600....in 1987.


slightly more modern times, the ati 9700pro was >£400 on release. the 6800 ultra was >£400. both the 7900x and 8800gtx were, give or take, £500 on release....

....the Pentium extreme 820 (pentium D based), released in 2005 was $1k OEM, $1.2k retail.... the earlier single core pentium extreme was also $1k....

So no, top end gear has always been that expensive ;)
 
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