Re:Apple's First Public Demonstration of the Mac, Unseen Sin...
by nly on Sunday January 26, 2014 @11:48AM
(#7125674)
The price of such a thing made my mind boggle as well. It makes me wonder what equivalent devices exist today in the '10x what is affordable' price bracket which we will all be enjoying and taking for granted in 30 years.
Any guesses?
Re:Apple's First Public Demonstration of the Mac, Unseen Sin...
by NAFV_P on Sunday January 26, 2014 @12:38PM
(#7125912)
> Any guesses?
I'm guessing a small proportion of the Earth's population will be cyborgs, but I am a Ghost In The Shell fan.
Thought I'd work out how much mass in UK copper coins would be required to buy 19 Crays ...
just over 72,000 tons, you'd need about 10 class 37 freight trains to haul that.
I used this site:
http://www.usinflationcalculator.com
$2495 in 1984 inflates to a hard to swallow $5,594.11, an increase of 124.2%.
Being a limey this this is hard for me to comprehend. So I looked at this page:
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/data/EXUSUK.txt
There were $1.4076 per £1 in January 1984, which roughly equates as £0.71 per $1. So if I wanted to buy a brand new Mac 30 years ago, I would have had to cough up around £3974 in today's money.
A quick browse for IMac prices, around £1300 (~$2135, the dollar had a higher value compared to the pound in 1984 than today).
My father's IMac boasts a 2Ghz processor. How many of your vital organs would you have to sell on Ebay to buy 2Ghz of kick in 1984?
Here is a picture of a Cray X-MP:
http://images.tribe.net/tribe/upload/photo/8c4/74c/8c474c54-...
A Cray X-MP in 1984 would cost about $15,000,000 for 105Mhz, so I would require 19 Crays, costing a total of $285,000,000. Taking into account inflation, today that would be a bank-breaking $639,006,208.
I'm trying to remember the source, but I think the CDC 7600 packed 512Kb of memory back in 1969. The Mac had a comparable amount but cost about a 1000 times less.