OT: Server pricing 1999

[Fairlight]

The honourable and venerable Richard Kreiss spoke thus:
> P3 Xeon 500 MHz w.512K memory
> SuperMicro Dual Xeon GX chipset, Adaptec 7890 SCSI Ultra 2 Wide, 128 PC100
> ECC SDRAM, 2 9.1 Barracuda Fast SCSI-3 drive, 1 3.5 FDD, 8Mb AGP 3D video,
> ATX full tower case, 32X NEC SCSI CS-ROM, sound Blaster 15, speaker
> keyboard, mouse 3Com 3C905B-tx NIC Windows Server NT 5 user license
> $3,299.00
> 
> If I go back further, my fist Radio Shack Model II with 64K of memory, the 3
> drive expansion bay, a 9 pin wide carriage dot matrix printer, cable and
> Profile cost me somewhere near $8,000.00.  I think there was some more
> software & hardware involved in that purchase but I don’t remember any more.
> 
> Oh, back to work - some much for another walk down memory lane.

My first Apple ][e rig was the 6502 (rather than the Platinum Edition's
65c02, to which I later swapped chips so modem software would work with
flow control) model, with twin Apple Disk ][ 117KB floppy drives (that were
the size of 5.25" hard drives!), an 80-column card that had an extra 64KB
of RAM on top of the stock 64KB of RAM (but it was segmented--you had to
page back and forth to use all 128KB), and I had two monitors...one
Motorola monochrome, and a Commodore 1604 colour.  All told, I think it was
over $6500.

Nowadays, I could put together several i7/16GB/2TB systems with top of the
line 3D video cards for that cost.  I could literally buy four of my
current system (E8400 @ 3GHz, 3GB, wireless, 1TB, NVidia GTX 275 Co-Op PhysX
1280MB edition with the GTX 250 second GPU handling the PhysX, 16x DVD/RW).
I just ran the pricing and I could literally get four of those at spring
2008 prices (except the video card, which I just put in last weekend, so
that pricing is current) for the same amount.

I don't know which to feel...outraged that we got reamed so badly in the
old days, or happy that the hardware finally hit commodity levels so the
prices dropped.  Probably a bit of both.

mark->
-- 
Audio panton, cogito singularis,