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The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95

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Re: The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95

#71

Post by TrackerFF »

watersb wrote: post #47

I'm a bit surprised at the nostalgic reactions. For me, the reaction is still that twitching from the stress. Apple had less than 90 days of payroll in the bank and becoming irrelevant. A notebook computer that could do office work cost at least $3000 and came its own custom luggage for the ten pounds of cables, dongles, extra batteries. You could use it with your glorious 15-inch color monitor at work, with another…

I think people forget how fast prices declined, and how fast stuff got outdated / obsolete.

We paid something like $4k-$5k for a PC back in 1995. I think it was a 120 or 133 MHz, 16 MB ram, and 500 MB HDD. Came with Win 95. Probably 90% of its use went to Office and Excel.

3-4 years later, pretty much unusable for any kind of (then) modern application, like games. Even if you could buy a graphic card, like Voodoo or whatever, the CPU and RAM wouldn't cut it. Besides, a decent new PC would "only" cost you around half of what you paid back in 1994/1995.

When I purchased a gaming PC in early 2008, that PC could still handle modern games 10 years later! And that was a mid-level gaming PC I paid around $1k for.

Re: The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95

#73

Post by prionassembly »

pjc50 wrote: post #64
yread wrote: post #42

> Digital cash will bring home shopping and pay-per-view to the Internet, as well as new forms of asset protection, money laundering, and tax evasion. Still waiting for the pay-per-view microtransactions

Microtransactions for content are never going to take off because of the friction and the potential for microfraud.

openseas.com

Re: The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95

#74

Post by ok123456 »

fein wrote: post #3

> Cancelbot wars. As spamming and the spam-killing cancelbots become more widespread, people will find their Usenet News messages canceled by someone who simply doesn't like them. Cancelbot software will spread, as people begin editing out opposing views and unfriendly ideas. Prescient. This is automoderator on Reddit to a T.

When I was about 11, I remember I asked for disk images of Logo for Apple ][ or something along those lines on Usenet.

Someone at a university cancelled the message, but then felt pangs of guilt. He emailed me an apology and then offered to send me the disks through the mail. I emailed him back my address, and he sent the disks to me through the "snail mail" as they called it back then.

Re: The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95

#77

Post by georgewsinger »

TrackerFF wrote: post #71
watersb wrote: post #47

I'm a bit surprised at the nostalgic reactions. For me, the reaction is still that twitching from the stress. Apple had less than 90 days of payroll in the bank and becoming irrelevant. A notebook computer that could do office work cost at least $3000 and came its own custom luggage for the ten pounds of cables, dongles, extra batteries. You could use it with your glorious 15-inch color monitor at work, with another…

I think people forget how fast prices declined, and how fast stuff got outdated / obsolete. We paid something like $4k-$5k for a PC back in 1995. I think it was a 120 or 133 MHz, 16 MB ram, and 500 MB HDD. Came with Win 95. Probably 90% of its use went to Office and Excel. 3-4 years later, pretty much unusable for any kind of (then) modern application, like games. Even if you could buy a graphic card, like Voodoo or…

This post chronicles the cost of early computing hardware over time, and you're absolutely right about how expensive things used to be: https://simulavr.com/blog/paying-for-productivity/

Re: The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95

#78

Post by nivenkos »

pjc50 wrote: post #69
bdw5204 wrote: post #5

> There's not much that's bad on the Net Given the EFF email address, I think that's probably a quote from the same Mike Godwin of "Godwin's Law" fame. In other words, somebody who would have known what he was talking about. It'd be unimaginable for any informed person to say that about today's internet. I'm not sure how much of that was that life was just better in the 90s when there were few real problems in the wo…

> life was just better in the 90s when there were few real problems in the world They were definitely there, you just couldn't see them or they weren't happening in your country or to people you knew. But there was a period of relative peace from the end of the Cold War to 9/11, and a great deal more "consensus". This was achieved because there was nowhere for people outside the consensus to get heard. > society as a…

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Re: The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95

#80

Post by johnohara »

watersb wrote: post #47

I'm a bit surprised at the nostalgic reactions. For me, the reaction is still that twitching from the stress. Apple had less than 90 days of payroll in the bank and becoming irrelevant. A notebook computer that could do office work cost at least $3000 and came its own custom luggage for the ten pounds of cables, dongles, extra batteries. You could use it with your glorious 15-inch color monitor at work, with another…

>The 1990s were expensive and awkward.

Wholly agree. Developing an application to be deployed to 100-200 users using a desktop client-server model easily ran into the thousands (tens of thousands today) and made one think very hard about which platforms were used.

Hard choices had to be made simply because you couldn't afford the cost of entry.

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