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It's incredible how much the prices have fallen and that's how it should be. Sure, I bought the 960 close to launch but still the difference is staggering.
The 960 Evo still chugs along albeit it's a new one because a few months after I bought it, I had to RMA it. I guess that's what happens when you are an early adopter. I lost a few hours of work when the original 960 Evo decided to stop working but it also taught me to be more paranoia with backups.
You young fellas sit back, I'mma tell you about the time in '96 that I bought a 1GB hard drive for a thousand doll-hairs. And then later that year got 64MB of RAM for another thousand doll-hairs, and the next month the price dropped in half. I could run two java programs AT THE SAME TIME!
My father went a bit nuts and bought our first family computer some time around '85. It was an 8088 Turbo XT with a 10MB hard drive. It was something like a $3,000 computer (which would be similar to $8,500 today, with inflation). That hard drive was so big, we thought we'd never fill it. The biggest game we had at the time, Star Flight took up two 360KB floppies, and both my brother and I could each have our own copies on the hard drive, without worrying about space. It was amazing.
But, tech moves on and what was once "bleeding edge" becomes old hat. I'm pretty sure there are calculators which can emulate that entire 8088. And, 10MB is a rounding error on modern drives. I also have little doubt that, 40 years from now we'll look back at 1TB hard drives and think "oh, how quaint".
I bought a Pentium 75 in 1995. It had a 1GB hdd and 16MB of ram with Windows 3.11 and 28.8k modem. It cost me $5000. In 1995 dollars that's $9,977.92 which seems insane.
Our first family computer they offered to double the HDD space to 20mb for an extra $500. "You'll never fill it up!" they claimed. My dad, being a practical guy, couldn't figure out why he would want to pay extra for something he'd never use.
My dad got tired of struggling so he just told me the future proof a build.
He said "Max out everything" So I did.
128gb ddr4 ram, ryzen 5600 4.6ghz 12 core hyperthreaded CPU, nvidia 2080. (He wouldn't let me get the 40x card)
curious why you would pair those specs with a mid-range cpu. wouldn't it have made more sense to go with a ryzen 9 if you were maxing everything out?
No joke though, in the 90s you could buy a HDD with a size advertised on the box and get it home to find that the drive was actually bigger than advertised. They were making advances so fast in the manufacturing that they literally didn't have the time (or it wasn't worth the cost) to keep up with updating the boxes.
I once was able to store everything I needed on a couple of 100 mb Zip disks. And amazingly they didn't fail on me despite using them all the time.
First time I built a computer (late '97), I had to settle for the 850MB HDD. The 1GB was just outside my budget.
I got excited when we got a math-coprocessor for our 386 33MHz. I tried my hardest to get a sound blaster card so I didn’t have to use PC speaker to play games (namely TFX), but it was deemed too expensive for little reward.
Your parents weren't worried about the math co-processor doing all your homework for you? That was the GPT-387? :-)
I had typewriter classes back then!!! Homework came on “photocopies” from a handcranked machine that had a lot of rollers from memory. I have no idea what it was, but it was witchcraft!
Edit: I looked it up for curiosity sake, and the “witchcraft” machine might have been called a mimeograph.
The wonderful ditto machine! Loved the smell of those copies!
Ram is $50/mb, HDD $1/mb.
A blank CD-R is $10, but stores as much as 400 floppies!
But you also need to purchase a CD drive which is another $15 making it more expensive than a 128 GB SSD.
I think a 128MB CF drive would have cost $thousands in 1996.
Well To be honest java is a slug, especially on old hardware. If you wanted speed you would use some c or Assembler program....
I had been programming C for almost a decade at that time, and was tired of working so low level. I hoped Java would get me higher level, but it didn't work out. Eventually ended up on Python, which was fairly light weight, fast enough, but a joy to program (unlike java).