M2 Makeover

[Jules]

Notice that I am keeping the hell out of this conversation now, before all you kids figure out just how old I am......

(And yes, the hills were around long before I was.)

[pyronaught]

I could never afford an Amiga 1000, but eventually got a 500 but could never afford a hard drive so had floppy-only. One of my college friends spent $10,000 on a NeXT computer when they came out - like when they had the magneto-optical drive only. I guess he wanted it bad. Had a donated Apple-Lisa in high-school and much later I gave Lisa a ride home.

Wasn't NeXT pretty short lived? That was Steve Jobs brief reentry into the PC market before Apple realized what a big mistake they made by ousting him wasn't it? That would suck to have invested $10K into something that became a doorstop in such a short time frame.

I never had a hard drive for the Amiga 1000 either. I always wanted to get one of the HUGE 6MB memory cards for it for doing 3D CAD work, but could never afford it. Without that, 3D image generation progressed at about the same rate as 3D printing currently does!

[rsilvers]

NeXT came out in 1988 and when I was at grad school through 1996, NeXT OS was still the first choice of people in my group.

Since it is hard to keep any computer over five years, I would say eight years is a good run. And besides, OSX is based on the NeXT operating system, so it is still being upgraded.

My friend ended up coding stuff that has supported him for years, so the investment was an exceptionally good one.

$2800 in 1982 dollars for an Apple-2 with disk drive and OkiData dt-matrix printer is $7000 in today's money.

[pyronaught]

$2800 in 1982 dollars for an Apple-2 with disk drive and OkiData dt-matrix printer is $7000 in today's money.

The drop in price that has accompanied the increase in power of computer technology has actually been masked by the governments continual debasing of our currency. Computers are really about 1/4 the cost that they were back then, but only appear to be 1/2 the cost due to the dollar only being worth half as much. Most things actually get cheaper over time due to more efficient production methods, but the Fed practice of money printing keeps the prices the same or higher. Everyone just shrugs it off as "inflation," as if things naturally get more expensive over time. Only in the cases of diminishing resources like wood or oil is that true. The rest is just a big invisible, inescapable tax levied on every last person through intentional dilution of the money supply.