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''I've been in retailing 30 years and I have never seen any category of goods get on a self-destruct pattern like this,'' said Everett Purdy, senior vice president of merchandising for Service Merchandise, which sells home computers through its catalogs and showrooms. Since fall 1982, T.I.'s list price has tumbled from $400 to less than $100.

That price plunge turned an unaffordable extravagance into something I could actually buy and start using every day. It wasn't just the computers that became cheaper, but the peripherals (disk drives, modems, printers) and software as well. Suddenly, a home system that was never going to happen could be picked up piecemeal at a fraction of the price.

I wonder how many programmers owe their current careers to this early shakeout and price collapse.

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I for one learned to program on a TI 99/4A, which I suspect my parents chose based on price. I didn’t really choose a career in software, it just grew out of summer programming jobs I had during college, so reasonable to say I at least partially owe my career to the prices of that time.

Same: I was offered a choice between the TI and the Vic-20, the two cheapest options you could find in a store. The TI seemed better for basic programming, though the Vic probably had more games available.

> Since fall 1982, T.I.'s list price has tumbled from $400 to less than $100.

Besides prices got to rising again... Now $400 is the starting price for a laptop/PC, and people pay over $3000 often...

You forgot about inflation and chromebooks.

$100 in 1983 is $253.90 in 2018[0]. Here's a chromebook with 2GB RAM and 16GB storage for $116[1]. You can probably get a used one on craigslist for less.

$400 in 1983 is $1,015.60 in 2018. You can buy the lowest spec'd version of the older macbook air for $1000, or the lowest spec'd version of the new one for $1200[2].

[0] http://www.in2013dollars.com/1983-dollars-in-2018?amount=100

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Acer-C720p-2625-Touchscreen-ChromeBoo... it probably sucks but it's the cheapest one I saw in the search results

[2] https://www.apple.com/us/shop/buy-mac/macbook-air

To be fair, prices dropping that low is a relatively recent phenomenon. A fully working and useful general purpose computer (including display) was never less than like 5-700 for most of the 90s and 00s in my experience.

I remember cheap 286 and 386’s for $1200/1400, but I don’t remember computers getting down to $500 until eMachines in 1999/2000

I'm not saying it was always that low, but that's the lowest I ever saw it get.

The Acer C270 line of Chromebooks is my favorite because you can run pretty much any Linux distro from a USB, thanks to the Intel CPU.

It's funny how you round off precise Mac prices in a sensible way but insist on quoting much much much more fuzzy inflation calculator output with ludicrous 1 cent precision.

Possibly I'm being downvoted for snark, which is reasonable and I apologise. However I do think I am making an important point, "$400 in 1983 is $1,015.60 in 2018" is basically an innumerate statement. Multiple people make the same mistake in this thread, it seems that people like these inflation calculators and I suppose the fault lies mainly with them for not rounding their output sensibly. $400 in 1983 dollars very (very) roughly corresponds to $1000 of purchasing power today. The dramatic changes in society since 1983 mean that a representative basket of goods has changed dramatically (no Netflix subscription in 1983 for example). So you can only do a very rough calculation. Some things have gotten dramatically cheaper (international travel) some things are barely comparable (advanced healthcare). You somehow have to weigh these things fairly. Basically it's apples versus oranges all the way down. To me "$400 in 1983 is $1,015.60 in 2018" is almost a canonical example of pure and unadulterated nonsense. And yes, I have got a bee in my bonnet on this particular issue :- )

At some point you use the same inflation index everybody else uses.

The problem is not the inflation index: it's quoting approximate numbers with inherently wide error margins with too many digits of precision.

Indeed, thanks. My real beef is with the silly precision but I got distracted explaining (probably unnecessarily) exactly why it can only ever be a very approximate estimate.

A raspberry pi is $25 and far exceeds the home computer of the 80s and most of the home computers sold in the 90s.

People pay more because they want more. If your goal is just learning how computers work, you have far cheaper options today.

> A raspberry pi is $25 and far exceeds the home computer of the 80s and most of the home computers sold in the 90s.

But what Moore's law giveth, web developers taketh away. If you want to use a computer to participate in the modern society, you need much more than a Raspberry Pi, due to web bloat.

This first struck me in 2008. You could get a lightweight Linux distro running on just about anything. People'd spend all this time arguing over which windowing system used fewer resources. But, it never mattered. None of the windowing systems performed more slowly than a standard web browser on a modern webpage. Worse, most of the bloat is stuff the user explicitly doesn't want: tracking, advertisements, even more tracking.

It's easy (and trendy) to point the blame at web developers and businesses who bloat their webapp with advertisements and trackers, but for many of those businesses, that's the only way they would make money.

There are many things consumers are willing to pay for with their time and patience, but not their cash. As it turns out many of those things are web "services". If they were truly valuable on the same level as say, food, people would gladly pay cash for the service.

YouTube is a great example for me personally. If you told me I had to pay a monthly subscription of $10, I'd stop watching YouTube instantly. But since it's "free" I'll sit through a few ads. I don't mind paying with my time.

Without ads we would just have to teach our friends how to use IRC, FTP and rsync.

That, and we wouldn't have content, so we'd also have to teach them hand shadow puppetry for entertainment...

I'm still on board xD

Plenty of people still write travel blogs and think pieces without getting a salary for it. The thing that drives me crazy is twitter / facebook etc showing me content produced for free and STILL put it next to an ad.

>The thing that drives me crazy is twitter / facebook etc showing me content produced for free and STILL put it next to an ad.

It's free to produce -- but it costs to run a huge network of Twitter scale to post it

Your point is taken, and I agree that very many folks are not being reasonable about what they want. The money has to come from somewhere.

That said, I think I'd be perfectly happy if most websites went under. What we're getting out of it (novelty, entertainment) isn't worth the cost (attention span, loss of privacy) in most cases.

I started using the Brave browser this week, and it is amazing the difference it makes to have that blocked.

Yup - you need a smartphone. Low end - $100?

Define what exactly it means to participate in the modern society.

Load a page of tweets.

I think that’s kind of flippant. The reality is that it’s very difficult to apply for jobs or even do banking effectively without internet access and a capable browser. I think this is what the parent means by “engage with society”.

Although, I think a rPI is capable, even if it would be frustratingly slow.

Flippant or not, it's a good demonstration of how a prerequisite of participating in a Twitter-and-Facebook-driven modern society is using a computer that's powerful enough to handle all the garbage those two companies insist upon running on said computer whenever you so much as think of participating in said society.

The World Wide Web would be a much better place if web developers/designers showed even the slightest bit of restraint when it comes to shoving arbitrary Turing-complete code down my throat. Statistically-speaking, 95+% of it doesn't benefit me in the slightest, and there's a special place in hell for those who write websites such that I have to put up with that 95% that's garbage just to use the site at all.

Loading 10 or 20 or even 1000 140-character tweets should be possible even on an old DOS PC with dialup, and yet even 10-year-old PCs with multiple orders of magnitude more processing power and network speed/bandwidth struggle with that.

At the very minimum, using the sites of your local and national government, and your bank. Normal levels of participation involve using e-mail, search engines, information sites, reading news, buying things on-line and social media.

Most of those sites are incredibly bloated. Even bank dashboards have become increasingly heavy (for near zero value added).

Um ... nope. I run a web based dashboard (based on a React front end and cloud hosted services) in Raspberry Pi. It runs fast, cheap and cool.

I think you are not taking his statement in good faith. He is speaking towards the current ecosystem, not a homebrew application you manage

I am taking his statement in good faith. The "homebrew" application I created runs the exact some frameworks (Javascript with React/Flux/etc packaged with Webpack and calling Ajax based services inside of a browser based on Chromium) that any other modern web application would use.

What browser are you running on your pi?

Chromium (latest version)

>A raspberry pi is $25 and far exceeds the home computer of the 80s and most of the home computers sold in the 90s.

That would be relevant if the metric was "cpu power of computer sold in the 80s".

There were some $100 (or even $25) pieces of hardware far more powerful than ENIAC in 1980 as well.

But the relevant metric is "cpu power appropriate for contemporary uses and programs" -- and in 2018 it means what people in 2018 consider a home computer.

>If your goal is just learning how computers work, you have far cheaper options today.

Why would that be your goal? That's only of interest to programmers and tinkerers, not 95% of the population.

In 1983 “learning how computers work” was a huge goal for many buyers. Parents bought computers so that kids could learn to use them, which often meant learning to program. (BTW, thank you, mom and dad).

Eniac equivalent computers available for $25 in 1980. Do tell me more.

Eniac was only 500 flops and after an upgrade only had 100 words of ram. So a 6502 released in 1975 was a ~1,000x faster 8 bit cpu for 25$, granted very different architecture but easily much faster even if you where emulating an eniac. For reference a ‘speak and spell’ sold for 50$ back then and had IO but was not programmable.

Given that ENIAC didn't have a monitor (or keyboard for that matter) you just needed a very slow CPU and some means of input and some lights for output (a little soldering could solve that).

The 6502 (available even earlier than 1980) cost $25 -- and was used (e.g. in C64 well into the mid-80s and even today).

ENIAC 0.00289 MIPS

Commodore 64 0.02 MIPS

And the motherboard? RAM?

The pi is a whole computer built around a SoC. The 6502 is a CPU only. This $25 claim seems questionable.

Well, I think 8086s were going for more than that, but Z80s or 6502s would probably fit the bill on MIPS if not IO.

heh. flippant comment but. flip that around.

" If your goal is just to work on computers, you have far cheaper options today. "

1 of my 2 desktops at work is a 2006 mac mini g-7450. it can email. and view pdfs and edit office documents. it has ten-four fox. and it can ssh. yeah. mostly email and ssh...

They would be $248 adjusted for inflation. But those tiny home computers came without a screen, hard disk, networking, a real OS, or pretty much anything we take for granted today. That $400 laptop packs in a ton of tech.

Many of them could just use your TV as display though, which went away pretty quick in the PC era.

> Many of them could just use your TV as display though, which went away pretty quick in the PC era.

Composite (and, later on, S-video) outputs were common on third-party CGA, EGA, and (S)VGA cards (not sure if official IBM ones did, but third party were more common.) Also, I think that Tandy’s quite popular proprietary graphics did. And VGA to composite, component, and S-Video adapters were all readily available, too.

And later, this shifted to HDMI being common for both video cards and TVs; the ability to use your TV as a PC display never went away, though TVs couldn't handle (until the HD era) the higher resolution modes used for text and later graphics (though it wasn't until SVGA that that became an issue for most games, which tends to favor higher color offer higher resolution modes.)

I had quite a few VGA video cards over that period of time and I think I only ever had one each that could do composite or svideo. I think at best it's something you could go out of your way for if you wanted but I don't remember it ever being the default. And definitely not on any integrated graphics on a motherboard that I can remember in the 386 to DVI/HDMI era.

There was a period where a lot of cards were sold with "TV out" as a bullet point-- usually a weird little port that connected to a breakout cable to provide S-video and/or component and composite. This seemed to be most common in the late AGP and early PCI-E era -- Geforce 2/3/4/FX/6, Radeon 8xxx/9xxx cards.

Before that, you could either get a "scan converter" which would convert VGA into composite video, or a specialty monitor which was typically a 27" or 32" CRT TB capable of synching to 640x480 VGA.

When flat-panel TVs started coming out they typically had a VGA or DVI port, and shortly thereafter HDMI, so it became moot.

Keep in mind here that the topic is cheap computers and once you get into scan converters and agp and pci-e gpus, let alone special monitors, we're well outside that realm.

And then came back when TVs started to ship with modern input ports.

And may go the other way again now that we can't avoid smart TV's.

Which annoys me to no end. I already have a Fire TV, a Chromecast, and multiple actual PCs. An additional computer that I can't replace or upgrade is useless to me, and it's even more frustrating when it gets in the way of using the TV for its intended purpose.

I don't understand why it's so hard for companies to build 4k dumb TVs. If anything it should be easier and cheaper to not include a bunch of smarts, right?

Well, to be fair $100 in 1980 is worth over $300 even if you believe inflation hasn't been systematically underestimated by CPI over the last 38 years.

I learned to program on a used pentium that I had brought from a friend and a copy of Delphi 3 that was included on a cd 2 that shipped with a computer magazine 2 years earlier...

Neither would have been possible if the prize had been as high as it was back in the day.

Include me in that group. It was still expensive for my blue collar parents, but with in reach after the price drops.

(I got C-64 first. Then later a tape drive and eventually the floppy drive and a printer).

The TI wasn't the big winner in the home /business pc market, and as the article says there was a massive shake out in the pc industry going on at the time.

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