Mastodawn

TrivialBetaState Aug 14, 2023

Cost of a 128KB computer with floppies in 1985

@zen - Sopuli

Apple Vision Pro launched at WWDC over a week ago and they showed a lot of clips of normal people wearing it doing (relatively) normal things, like cooking, watching movies, even working at the office. One clip that really intrigued me was the one where a father was recording his kids in 3D through his Vision Pro. To me, this seemed off at first since to other people, it may not look like you’re present in the moment. But after thinking about it for a while, isn’t it the same as just wearing sunglasses, if not better? Sunglasses block your eyes, but Vision Pro would show your eyes to the outside world. So I guess the question is, will Apple Vision Pro and subsequent products become widely socially acceptable one day?

Show thread

Brownian Motion Aug 14, 2023

So everything is about right. Today you can buy a budget pc, and skim on performance, but back then (and I was there man!) you could not.

In 1985 HDD were only starting to gain traction for PC’s and that was about the only thing you could spec up. That IBM pc is “High Res” which probably means it was VGA multicolour (yay!lol) with 640x480 resolution. So you were basically buying top of the line.

Today, if you were to build a top of the line PC, RTX4090, latest best intel cpu, PSU, etc, etc it would be easy to spend $5K!

But damn, the difference in performance from back then to now!! (That IBM is an XT which means it was a 4.77Mhz with 8086 cpu. Just looking at that picture, I can feel the weight of the bloody thing)

Show thread

WhiskyTangoFoxtrot

Today you can buy a budget pc, and skim on performance, but back then (and I was there man!) you could not.

For PCs? Maybe not, but you could get plenty of other types of home computer for reasonably cheap. A Commodore 64 was $150 in 1985, for instance. Just had to stay away from the absolute bleeding edge.