11–20 of 173 posts
Trying to answer the following might be fun as well: How much is a 1000 USD from today in that era in terms of purchasing power? What could you have bought with the equivalent amount of money, and how many people could have afforded the iPhone equivalent then?
Batteries
Cars
Houses
People
Dishwashers
TVs
Things that have improved exponentially since 1957:
Disk drives
Integrated Circuits
RAM
...and yet, even with all this computing power, simple tasks like loading a webpage full of text still take ridiculously long times. Maybe not with a '57 vacuum tube (transistors actually existed at the time already) computer, but then there's this: https://hubpages.com/technology/_86_Mac_Plus_Vs_07_AMD_DualC... The massive increase in computing power has been accompanied by a corresponding increase in complexity. Fo…
Fault of the the webpage or the phone? multiple milliseconds or seconds? Ridiculous! Those of old enough to remember 9600 baud know the disappointment (in our lifetimes) waiting many minutes to download a jpg just to find it wasn't what we wanted. Or that mp3 track from some obscure FTP server....
It was also pretty bad with a 56k modem as far as I remember -- definitely not minutes though! The wait becomes worse when the JPEG is of a... critical nature, if you know what I mean.
Trying to answer the following might be fun as well: How much is a 1000 USD from today in that era in terms of purchasing power? What could you have bought with the equivalent amount of money, and how many people could have afforded the iPhone equivalent then?
This site seems to have more prices of goods http://fiftiesweb.com/pop/prices-1957/
A cheap ford car was $1879 or 17 iPhones.
Kinda holds as a cheap ford today is around 14k
Trying to answer the following might be fun as well: How much is a 1000 USD from today in that era in terms of purchasing power? What could you have bought with the equivalent amount of money, and how many people could have afforded the iPhone equivalent then?
a 14 inch TV. Or tuition at harvard...
It's sort of an apples and oranges comparison. Obviously there are many things that couldn't be done with analog tech. But it's not as bad as you would expect with just naive comparisons based on the cost of vacuum tubes.