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''I've been in retailing 30 years and I have never seen any category of goods get on a self-destruct pattern like this,'' said Everett Purdy, senior vice presid
by apo 8y ago
''I've been in retailing 30 years and I have never seen any category of goods get on a self-destruct pattern like this,'' said Everett Purdy, senior vice president of merchandising for Service Merchandise, which sells home computers through its catalogs and showrooms. Since fall 1982, T.I.'s list price has tumbled from $400 to less than $100.
That price plunge turned an unaffordable extravagance into something I could actually buy and start using every day. It wasn't just the computers that became cheaper, but the peripherals (disk drives, modems, printers) and software as well. Suddenly, a home system that was never going to happen could be picked up piecemeal at a fraction of the price.
I wonder how many programmers owe their current careers to this early shakeout and price collapse.
- femto113 8y agoI for one learned to program on a TI 99/4A, which I suspect my parents chose based on price. I didn’t really choose a career in software, it just grew out of summer programming jobs I had during college, so reasonable to say I at least partially owe my career to the prices of that time.
- abecedarius 8y agoSame: I was offered a choice between the TI and the Vic-20, the two cheapest options you could find in a store. The TI seemed better for basic programming, though the Vic probably had more games available.
- coldtea 8y ago> Since fall 1982, T.I.'s list price has tumbled from $400 to less than $100. Besides prices got to rising again... Now $400 is the starting price for a laptop/PC, and people pay over $3000 often...
- dannypgh 8y agoA raspberry pi is $25 and far exceeds the home computer of the 80s and most of the home computers sold in the 90s. People pay more because they want more. If your goal is just learning how computers work, you have far cheaper options today.
- coldtea 8y ago>A raspberry pi is $25 and far exceeds the home computer of the 80s and most of the home computers sold in the 90s. That would be relevant if the metric was "cpu power of computer sold in the 80s". There were some $100 (or even $25) pieces of hardware far more powerful than ENIAC in 1980 as well. But the relevant metric is "cpu power appropriate for contemporary uses and programs" -- and in 2018 it means what people in 2018 consider a home computer. >If your goal is just learning how computers work, you have far cheaper options today. Why would that be your goal? That's only of interest to programmers and tinkerers, not 95% of the population.
- faccacta 8y agoIn 1983 “learning how computers work” was a huge goal for many buyers. Parents bought computers so that kids could learn to use them, which often meant learning to program. (BTW, thank you, mom and dad).
- djmips 8y agoEniac equivalent computers available for $25 in 1980. Do tell me more.
- B1FF_PSUVM 8y agoWell, I think 8086s were going for more than that, but Z80s or 6502s would probably fit the bill on MIPS if not IO.
- Retric 8y agoEniac was only 500 flops and after an upgrade only had 100 words of ram. So a 6502 released in 1975 was a ~1,000x faster 8 bit cpu for 25$, granted very different architecture but easily much faster even if you where emulating an eniac. For reference a ‘speak and spell’ sold for 50$ back then and had IO but was not programmable.
- coldtea 8y agoGiven that ENIAC didn't have a monitor (or keyboard for that matter) you just needed a very slow CPU and some means of input and some lights for output (a little soldering could solve that). The 6502 (available even earlier than 1980) cost $25 -- and was used (e.g. in C64 well into the mid-80s and even today). ENIAC 0.00289 MIPS Commodore 64 0.02 MIPS
- kurthr 8y agoWell, to be fair $100 in 1980 is worth over $300 even if you believe inflation hasn't been systematically underestimated by CPI over the last 38 years.
- slededit 8y agoThey would be $248 adjusted for inflation. But those tiny home computers came without a screen, hard disk, networking, a real OS, or pretty much anything we take for granted today. That $400 laptop packs in a ton of tech.
- stormbrew 8y agoMany of them could just use your TV as display though, which went away pretty quick in the PC era.
- yellowapple 8y agoAnd then came back when TVs started to ship with modern input ports.
- flukus 8y agoAnd may go the other way again now that we can't avoid smart TV's.
- yellowapple 8y agoWhich annoys me to no end. I already have a Fire TV, a Chromecast, and multiple actual PCs. An additional computer that I can't replace or upgrade is useless to me, and it's even more frustrating when it gets in the way of using the TV for its intended purpose. I don't understand why it's so hard for companies to build 4k dumb TVs. If anything it should be easier and cheaper to not include a bunch of smarts, right?
- dragonwriter 8y ago> Many of them could just use your TV as display though, which went away pretty quick in the PC era. Composite (and, later on, S-video) outputs were common on third-party CGA, EGA, and (S)VGA cards (not sure if official IBM ones did, but third party were more common.) Also, I think that Tandy’s quite popular proprietary graphics did. And VGA to composite, component, and S-Video adapters were all readily available, too. And later, this shifted to HDMI being common for both video cards and TVs; the ability to use your TV as a PC display never went away, though TVs couldn't handle (until the HD era) the higher resolution modes used for text and later graphics (though it wasn't until SVGA that that became an issue for most games, which tends to favor higher color offer higher resolution modes.)
- shpx 8y agoYou forgot about inflation and chromebooks. $100 in 1983 is $253.90 in 2018[0]. Here's a chromebook with 2GB RAM and 16GB storage for $116[1]. You can probably get a used one on craigslist for less. $400 in 1983 is $1,015.60 in 2018. You can buy the lowest spec'd version of the older macbook air for $1000, or the lowest spec'd version of the new one for $1200[2]. [0] http://www.in2013dollars.com/1983-dollars-in-2018?amount=100 http://www.in2013dollars.com/1983-dollars-in-2018?amount=100 [1] https://www.amazon.com/Acer-C720p-2625-Touchscreen-ChromeBook-Refurbished/dp/B01E9GBRU2 https://www.amazon.com/Acer-C720p-2625-Touchscreen-ChromeBoo... it probably sucks but it's the cheapest one I saw in the search results [2] https://www.apple.com/us/shop/buy-mac/macbook-air https://www.apple.com/us/shop/buy-mac/macbook-air
- stormbrew 8y agoTo be fair, prices dropping that low is a relatively recent phenomenon. A fully working and useful general purpose computer (including display) was never less than like 5-700 for most of the 90s and 00s in my experience.
- eugeniub 8y agoThe Acer C270 line of Chromebooks is my favorite because you can run pretty much any Linux distro from a USB, thanks to the Intel CPU.
- billforsternz 8y agoIt's funny how you round off precise Mac prices in a sensible way but insist on quoting much much much more fuzzy inflation calculator output with ludicrous 1 cent precision.
- tomjen3 8y agoI learned to program on a used pentium that I had brought from a friend and a copy of Delphi 3 that was included on a cd 2 that shipped with a computer magazine 2 years earlier... Neither would have been possible if the prize had been as high as it was back in the day.
- walshemj 8y agoThe TI wasn't the big winner in the home /business pc market, and as the article says there was a massive shake out in the pc industry going on at the time.
- KSS42 8y agoInclude me in that group. It was still expensive for my blue collar parents, but with in reach after the price drops. (I got C-64 first. Then later a tape drive and eventually the floppy drive and a printer).