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What Did $4000 Buy You From Dell in 1996?

I was taking some pictures at a house today, and happened to glance on the bookshelf to notice some old magazines. Like 10 year old magazines. One of them was a 10-year old copy of PC Magazine (with a cover story about online services like Prodigy and Compuserve -- those were the days), and happened to turn over the magazine to look at this back cover ad (sorry about the crappy quality -- my flatbed scanner as work was on the fritz, so I had to take a picture of it).

Back in the day that $4000+ laptop was top of the line. With its 90mhz Pentium, 10.4" screen, and 810 megabyte hard drive, you were cruising in style. For nearly $5000, you could get a Pentium 120.

But if you were a businessman, you might be more interested in this offering:

So for $15,000, you could get two servers with Pentium 133mhz processors, 32 megs of ram, 4GB hard drives, plus they'll throw in a 12-port 10-Base-T switch. Damn, that's sweet!

It's amazing how much hardware you can by for that price nowadays. Sadly, though, this is about the time I graduated high school, and I paid nearly $3,000 for a Pentium 133 system when I graduated -- it was a speed demon compared to the family's 486SX25.

Posted by Jake on 09/18/06 @ 10:52 PM
Posted in Geekdom, Interesting | 3 Comments | Permalink
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3 Comments

monkeyinabox said on 09/19/06 @ 08:08 AM:
It always teaches you not to invest in computers. It's worse than buying a car. Atleast in 10 years a car will still be useable.

The good part is you can buy a Porsche in the computer world for $2000 now.

Jo-Anne said on 09/19/06 @ 04:22 PM:
but but but my 486 still works!!!! LOL,well ok some of it does ( not willing to subject myself to humiliation @ the price I paid back when...)
---waits for Smithsonian to contact me!
;)

Jesse said on 09/21/06 @ 02:12 PM:
In 1984 my uncle david bought (and in my 1995 poor college days I inherited)

An IBM 8088 PC
4 color, 320x200 CGA (b/w 640x200 mode also available) video card and monitor.
300 baud modem
640kb RAM
2, count them TWO 360k capacity 5.5" floppy drives
Beige Keyboard
No Hard Drive
I don't think it came with a printer, either.

$4400

I came across the invoice after I had already "upgraded" to a 1200 baud modem scrounged from DSI at the time.

Among the 3 ring binders of documentation was that for the DOS 2.0 operating system it came with (I was running 6.2 at the time, just before Windows 95 launched). It's huge marketing angle?

"Now with directory folders!"

If I understand properly the folders couldn't be nested until DOS 3.0 ;)

Chris is right though. The major news in PC trending over the last decade is not just getting more for your dollar, but using fewer dollars to get the same relative caliber of computer. That part stayed flat from the late seventies, and then began lowering in the late nineties. Now you can get a hella decent computer.. even a laptop.. if you are careful for under a grand. :)

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