I've got a memory module (core memory) for an ancient cdc 3170 mainframe that has 16K 24-bit words (48KB) that had a replacement cost back in 1976 or so of about $10K. I GBs worth of this kind of memory (not taking inflation into account--or facilities and air conditioning) would be around $208M! It's maybe 8"x8"x18" and weighs (I'm guessing) 30-40 pounds. Makes a cool paperweight! :-)

Wonder what that is if you adjust for inflation.

And my parents bought me a floppy drive for my Apple ][ for $800 that could only hold 140K, imagine how much a 160GB drive would cost back then!

I was thinking of this the other day. I saw a 120GB HD on sale for $20 after rebate. In the early 90s I bought an external HD for my wife's computer - 512MB for about $500. At that rate ($1/MB) that 120GB drive would have cost $120,000.

I'm 30, and the first computer I owned was a Timex Sinclair 1000 (aka ZX81). It was the cheapest computer around when I got it in 1983, but it had 2k of RAM!! Think about it, that's 2048 characters/bytes! And let's not forget that it's Z80 CPU was running at like 0.2MHZ!

There was a bulky 16k RAM extension available, at a price higher than the computer itself! (Something like 150-200$).

My current Mac has like 20,000 times more RAM than this :)

I still have a couple of old computer magazines from the era, and these are really fun to read these days, if only for the prices :-)

I'm only a young guy, but I've been building my computers for about 6 years now since I was 11. I allways decided upon what was worth upgrading and what was just enuconomical by thinking about where computer's would be in a few years. I remember four years ago, I calculated what 2 GB of good quality ram would cost, and it came arround to $2Gs. 500 GBs of HD space could cost over 1G, and and a multiple processor machine would mean a really expensive motherboard and 1G worth of CPUs. Now days you can get that ram fora few hundred, as well as the hard drive space, and as for multiple processors, you can get dual-core or hyper-threading at the average cost of a CPU

In 1972, my department at Stanford bought an HP 9830 desktop computer. It came with 2K of RAM. We decided to increase the RAM amount to 6K to allow us to run bigger programs. That extra 4K of RAM cost $4,000; i.e., $1/Byte. Therefore 1GB of RAM back then would have cost $1 Billion.

Live Publishing, the company behind magazines such as Retro Gamer and PC Utilities, is to cease operations by the end of the week, administrator BWC Business Solutions has confirmed to MCV.

Live Publishing, the company behind magazines such as Retro Gamer and PC Utilities, is to cease operations by the end of the week, administrator BWC Business Solutions has confirmed to MCV.

The Macclesfield-based outfit recently pulled the plug on PC Extreme magazine, with production on all its titles now due to cease in the next few days.

“We have not yet been appointed as the administrators for Live Publishing but we will be by the end of the week,” BWC Business Solutions’ Mark Thomas told MCV. “The options open to us at the moment are either liquidation or administration. Either way, Live will stop trading by Friday.”

MCV understands that freelance staff have not been paid for a number of months, and the staff of Retro Gamer are said to have been made redundant on Monday.

The news comes after recent ABC figures revealed an overall decline in gaming and computer magazine readership.

According to the Inflation Calculator [1], $23.92 million US dollars in 1983 are worth approximately $45.69 million US dollars now (2005).

Dang.

[1] http://www.westegg.com/inflation/