[AT] Slightly OT Tractors and technology

charlie hill charliehill at embarqmail.com
Tue Jul 1 17:27:42 PDT 2014


David,  go buy the cheapest one you can find that will meet most of your 
requirements and
save the rest of the money.  Next year (or two) you'll be able to buy one 
that exceeds your current
requirements for less than the other half of the money.   I really have no 
more use of
a desk top computer.  The notebooks these days can be configured to do about 
anything you can
do on a desk top.   I bought this notebook I'm using now about 4 years ago 
(at least that long)
and it's still going.  It's off the shelf from Best Buy and I think it was a 
hair less than $600.00.
It could use more RAM but I do some fairly complex graphics on it with no 
real problems.

Charlie

-----Original Message----- 
From: David Bruce
Sent: Tuesday, July 01, 2014 5:07 PM
To: Antique tractor email discussion group
Subject: Re: [AT] Slightly OT Tractors and technology

An example of Moore's law with the improvement in computer capabilities
and the reduction in cost.
My first was a Tandy TRS-80 model III with a cassette (not even floppy
drives - the 5.25 " type). Later I moved the 2 disk drive model with 64K
of RAM. Cost about $2600.  Seems like for years a replacement computer
cost about $2600 in those dollars.

These days I'm researching a replacement desktop for this Win XP system.
When I add all the goodies I want guess what? About $2600 dollars. Guess
my wants have outgrown my budget.

David
NW NC
On 7/1/2014 9:53 AM, Stephen Offiler wrote:
> That's beyond amazing.  Just mind-boggling.
>
> First computer I owned was a genuine IBM PC, the first model that replaced
> the 8088 with the 80286 processor. This was in the mid 1980's, probably
> just shy of 30 years ago. It had a 30 megabyte hard drive.  It ran DOS. 
> It
> cost $3000 ($6600 in today's dollars).  It's a long story, but a friend 
> who
> was starting a small business purchased it (for tax writeoff purposes) and
> I did work for him to pay it off.  I am thinking that hard drive, in very
> rough numbers, must have been worth about $500 ($1100 in today's dollars).
>   Charlie could buy 16 of those 1.5T drives for $1100.  24 terabytes 
> versus
> 30 megabytes!!!
>
> 24T is 2.639E13 bytes
>
> 30M is 3.146E7 bytes.
>
> Dividing, you get a factor of about 839,000 times more capacity for the
> buck!
>
> Viewed in terms of Moore's Law:  839,000 is 2 raised to a factor of 20
> (pretty darn close anyway)... in other words, it has doubled 20 times in 
> 30
> years.  That's an average of once every 18 months.  That is EXACTLY what
> Moore's Law states!  Fascinating stuff!
>
> -SO
>
>
>
> On Mon, Jun 30, 2014 at 10:31 PM, charlie hill 
> <charliehill at embarqmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Correction.  I just looked at my online banking and that 1.5 TB drive
>> was $69.00 with free shipping.
>>
>> Charlie
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: charlie hill
>> Sent: Monday, June 30, 2014 10:19 PM
>> To: Antique tractor email discussion group
>> Subject: [AT] Slightly OT Tractors and technology
>>
>> I remember when I first learned of this group
>> when Spencer was running it out of the Forsythe County
>> servers.   I think I was running a 286 computer
>> with Win. 3.1.  If I remember right it just had a few megabytes
>> of memory.  About a month ago I upgraded my Android
>> phone to a model that has 32 gigabytes of memory,  That
>> phone cost less money than that old 286 computer by about half
>> and it was used when I bought it.
>>
>> Then last week I saw a deal online and ordered it.  It came today
>> and I just installed it.  A 1.5 TB  Western Digital external hard drive.
>> It's about as bit as a deck of playing cards and it cost me a whopping
>> $89 bucks with free shipping.
>>
>> Meanwhile the price of old tractors continues to go up and new
>> tractors have gone out of sight.
>>
>>
>>
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