Quote:
Originally Posted by carpetmojo
Ardeegee - I'll give you the lumbering, but not the expensive, or the dinosaurs
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Then we do not share the same definition of "expensive." I'll refer back to one of the 1996 ads I
linked. The cheapest computer on that page has a 14 inch CRT, 8 MB of RAM, an 850 MB HD, and a 100 MHz CPU and costs $1776. And what could you do with it? Well, it was reasonably fast for text-based applications-- word processing, spread sheets, etc, but even back then that 8 MB of RAM was a crippling limitation. And you can forget about playing any decent video-- unless you conciser a 320x240x15fps MPEG1 to be decent video. (With my first DVD drive in 1998, I had to have a dedicated decoder card just to play DVD video because the CPUs of the day simply couldn't handle it-- and DVDs are a fraction of the resolution of what I play on my computer today, through the CPU, taking up 10% or less of my CPU power.) You don't even have enough HD space to store much more than text and low-resolution photos-- forget about having a collection of MP3s or even a single movie.
Now, let's look at what
Dell offers today-- for $450 you get an 18.5 inch LCD, 4096 MB of RAM, a 1,000,000 MB HD, and a pair of 3,200 MHz CPUs. The modern computer has 64 times the raw CPU speed, 512 times as much RAM, and 1,200 times as much HD space-- for 25 percent of the price. You won't convince me that the computers of 15 years ago weren't expensive.
As for the case size, there is a whole range of sizes to choose from-- I prefer at least a mid-tower because I do lots of tinkering (and have had as many as 4 optical drives in my computer at one time) but you can buy desktop computers that are similar in size to notebooks-- and
even smaller.