Index & Notes

My Computer Price Memories

It was down from the $10,000 HP prices of the same time, and the typical price change is more like a halving per decade. I won't dignify that statement with some pseudo-scientific graph, it's only a rule of thumb. The machines being compared are still not really comparable - most things on this slide, from my personal recollections of machines I've bought and machines my employers have bought, are at different function points. The VIC-20 never did anything useful because it had no printer. The original IBM-XT did some great traffic engineering for a U of C professor. The City of Calgary budget at bottom was double what you could do with clone purchase at the time, the price of buying all-IBM with every bell and whistle. A special deviation from the rule was the Commodore 64 in the middle, just $800 base, $1600 by the time you had a disk and printer.

© Roy Brander, P.Eng 2007