The Computer Buzz

April 22nd, 2010

Nome and Paul Van Middlesworth - owners - The Computer Factory
 

Then and Now

“Granny” Gransbury, a good friend and long time customer, was cleaning his garage last week when he found a May 5th, 1996, issue of the Orange County Register. One four page section was titled “It’s time to buy a computer.”

The section had a very thorough review of the state of the personal computer industry and some excellent suggestions on what to look for when buying your home or business PC. We happened to have one of our price sheets from December of 1996 so we were able to verify much of what the article recommended and compare it with today’s PCs.

Some things have changed little. The articles advise users to be wary of cheap PCs with old technology that may hasten obsolescence. It warns of “package rip-offs” by major brands that bundle PCs with cheap printers and monitors and scores of mostly useless PC clogging software and it points out the perils of buying “proprietary” PCs with non-standard components. Most PCs today have components that can be replaced with “industry standard” parts but there are PC marketers like Dell who still count on obscenely priced replacement parts to pump their profits.

PC components have either dropped in price or increased in function since 1996. $30 today will buy a thousand times more RAM. $100 will buy a hard drive that is two thousand times as large as the $100 hard drive of 1996. An Intel i7 CPU today has 731 million transistors running at nearly 3 billion cycles per second. The 1996 Pentium had 4 million transistors running at 150 million cycles per second.

A typical high-end 1996 desk-top PC might have had a Pentium 200MHz CPU, 1.2Gb hard drive, 16 Mb RAM, a 4X CD-ROM, 1.44 floppy drive, 2.0Mb video card, 28,800Kb fax modem, and the Windows 95 operating system. This system would have cost $2000.

This year’s high-end desk-top PC could have an Intel quad core i920 CPU @ 2.7GHz, 1000Gb hard drive, 4.0Gb RAM, 24X DVD-R/W, 512Mb video card, 1.0Gbit Ethernet interface and the Windows 7 Home Premium operating system. This system would cost about $1200.

PCs today are not only cheaper but several magnitudes more powerful than the models of yesteryear. The only items that have been able to buck the trend in feature, function and cost improvement belong (probably not coincidentally) to the PC industry’s only monopoly, Microsoft. In 1996 Windows 95, Microsoft’s premium operating system (Windows 95) cost about $70 or 3.5% of the cost of a computer system. Today Microsoft’s premium OS (Windows 7 Ultimate) costs $200 or about 16.7% of the cost of a new high end PC. Microsoft’s Office suites have also followed a similar pattern, increasing in cost while showing minimal advances in functionality.

Microsoft’s dominance is attributable not so much to product excellence (remember Vista) but rather to its immense size, take no prisoner style, and a whole bunch of lawyers. Kind of like our government.