Silvan responds:


Oh, I dunno. I have a $200 computer that's got a 40 gig hard drive, a 2 gig
processor, half a gig of ram... Sure, I got crap video and crap audio, a
crap mobo with only two slots, a comparatively small drive, no DVD stuff,
but damn, I got a ripping fast, perfectly functional computer for $200.

It wasn't all that long ago that I paid $800 for a CPU. Not that much
longer ago that $1/megabyte was a steal for hard drives. (That's really
scary when you think that the average low spec drive today in 2004 is
probably 80 gigs. By the old standard, it's an $81,920 drive. For $75.
Damn.)

Computers are probably a special case. My first PC (not my first computer) cost
me about $2800, 20 meg hard drive, 640K RAM, 5-1/4" floppy, 12" amber screen,
and that was IT. I wanted to fill out the RAM (IIRC, to I gig), and was quoted
a price of $1100. Hard drive went belly up, and it cost me about $300 to
replace it with a 32MB version.

About a year ago, I bought a second hard drive for this computer: a 120 gig USB
portable that also works on my laptop. The laptop has only a 15 gig hard drive,
while this desktop came from Dell with a 120 gig (now considered fairly small,
since a buddy of mine got a 250 gig for about the same price, but that's what
18 months in computerland does: my hot 3 gig Pentium IV, with a gig of RAM is
now fairly slow [yeah, right], but only in comparison to some of the new
stuff).

I wonder what computers will change to when they finally switch over to 64 bit
paths and write some programs for that.

It should make keeping track of CAD woodworking drawings a lot easier.

Charlie Self
"Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of
nothing."
Redd Foxx