Moore's Law Rules... or Depreciation Sucks (by Jeremy Zawodny)

I found a magazine from August of 1997. The inside back cover was an advertisement from Micron. Here was the top-of-the-line machine:

Intel 266MHz Pentium II (features MMX technology)
32MB EDO RAM
4GB IDE hard drive
19" Hitachi SuperScan CM751 (18" display)
Monster 3D graphics card with 4MB memory
3.5" floppy drive
100Mb Iomega Zip drive
DVD-ROM drive
AWE 64 sound card
Speakers, MS Sidewinder Pro joystick, Windows 95, Office 97, etc.

Total price: $4,199.

Don't even ask about the notebooks in the ad.

Amazing. 5-6 years later and CPUs are 10 times faster, we're using 8-16 times the RAM, and our disks are 10-80 times larger. Oh, and not only is everything today that much better, it's probably half the price.

Posted by jzawodn at May 29, 2003 11:34 AM

Reader Comments

# tfr said:

But where are the 38" monitors? :)

on May 29, 2003 11:42 AM

# brandt said:

i remember how impressed we all were back in 95 or 96 when you traded a laptop for 1 GB of disk space. so much for that...

on May 29, 2003 12:41 PM

# Jim O'Halloran said:

Wow, the specs on that are better than my home machine (which I also bought in 1997). About time I upgraded methinks.

on May 29, 2003 06:50 PM

# Anders said:

Interestingly, the above PC with Linux/FreeBSD/etc will still be a great machine (maybe add some RAM...) for running a webserver / all sorts of web-applications, while I suspect you can't even fit Windows XP on there at all...?

on May 30, 2003 05:13 AM

# Arcterex said:

Wow, that sort of hardware (minus the dvd and monitor) are the sort of thing I have in my closet and will give away to friends or throw together a little server out of. It's sad/scary that that hardware is worth approximately $0 to me right now, or less if I have too much of it and it's taking up too much room.

Of course, I also still have my p133 system which ran my website for about 5 years, and an old 486 mb in my collection of computer bits "just in case". I think it might be time to throw out anything that doesn't have an ATX connector on it....

on May 30, 2003 09:24 AM

# Andrew said:

There are things which have not gotten better:

Computers today tend to be louder and consume more power.

Computers today tend to be less reliable (but it's a relative bargain to replace components), especially in the consumer arena.

Computers today are ugly as sin, because they all badly copy Apple design cues.

on June 4, 2003 07:16 PM