Charlie Self wrote:

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.

That actually happened years ago. The DEC Alpha was a 64-bit processor and
had a 64-bit OS, Windows NT. Right now you can buy 64-bit machines off the
shelf at Best Buy and install 64-bit Linux on them (or you could download
the Windows Beta, but it's time-bombed for a year and still has a lot of 32
bit code).

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

Not likely--that's really more of a programming issue and unless you have a
truly vast quantity of them (like Library of Congress vast) 32 vs 64 bit
isn't going to make much difference.

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

--
--John
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(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)