05 September 2024

Never Obsolete

This was a decent, consumer grade, personal computer twenty-five years ago. I've owned and used similar ones.

The computer I'm using now has a 1 TB optical drive (v. 15 GB, about 68 times more and less prone to corruption of data from, e.g., magnets), 16 GB of RAM (v. 64 MB, about 256 times more), a 1.5 GB graphics cache (v. 128 KB, about 12,200 times more), a 1.2 GHz quad core processor (v. 566 MHz single core processor, about 8 times faster), and a 1200 Mbps modem (v. 56 Kbps, about 22,000 times faster). 

I don't need a CDRW or 3.25 inch disk, since I can and do back things up to the cloud with Dropbox and Sharepoint and Google and Apple. 

Bluetooth and USB-C connections replace the USB and game ports. I have a converter for three common legacy port types (HDMI, USB, and a third one that I don't recall). I also have an old school headphone jack.

Windows 98 was nothing to love. I use MacOS Ventura 13 which is much less vulnerable to malware and less prone to hangups. 

My laptop is also much lighter (about 3 pounds) than this desktop, and can operate for hours without being plugged in. The desktop used more watts together with its monitor to operate than my laptop computer does. 

That computer didn't even have a password, mine has a password (which can be changed remotely, e.g., if it is stolen) and a fingerprint scanner. It is possible to activate a location scanner for my computer, which you couldn't do for this computer. 

The price adjusted for inflation (89% since then) was similar. 

My computer will almost certainly be obsolete some day and Apple doesn't claim otherwise. It is mildly outdated already.

The company that made the computer shown in the image is gone too:
eMachines was a brand of economical personal computers. 

eMachines was founded in September 1998 by Lap Shun Hui as a joint venture of South Korean companies Korea Data Systems and TriGem. The company sold PCs at prices [intially] ranging at $399 or $499, not including a monitor. By March 1999, the company was ranked fourth in U.S. computer sales, with a 9.9% market share.

In 2004, it was acquired by Gateway, Inc., which was in turn acquired by Acer Inc. in 2007. The EMachines brand was discontinued in 2013.

2 comments:

Dave Barnes said...

In 1972, the timeshare computer I was using (an IBM 370/158) got a memory upgrade. One million bytes for $1M USD. A dollar a byte. If constant pricing with inflation your 16GB of RAM would be $100 billion.

andrew said...

Crazy.