1988 vs. 2008: A tech retrospective

Ever wax nostalgic about your first PC or cell phone? It's easy to forgive your Tandy desktop or your Motorola portable for their limitations--after all, they were technological infants.

What we often forget, though, is how $%#@! expensive that crude neolithic junk was! So join us on a trip two decades back in technology's history--and we bet that the next time you're charged $895 for a small square of plastic and transistors, you'll smile and say, "Wow, what a bargain!" (Take our quiz on how techie you were in the 1980s.)

Home Desktop PCs

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Ever wax nostalgic about your first PC or cell phone? It's easy to forgive your Tandy desktop or your Motorola portable for their limitations--after all, they were technological infants.

What we often forget, though, is how $%#@! expensive that crude neolithic junk was! So join us on a trip two decades back in technology's history--and we bet that the next time you're charged $895 for a small square of plastic and transistors, you'll smile and say, "Wow, what a bargain!" (Take our quiz on how techie you were in the 1980s.)

Home Desktop PCs

1988: Tandy 1000 TL
-- Price: $1400 ($2454 adjusted for inflation)
-- CPU: Intel 80286
-- RAM: 640KB
-- Storage: 3.5-inch floppy
-- Monitor: 14-inch, 640-by-200 RGB CRT, 16 colors

2008: HP Pavilion Elite m9100z series
-- Price: about $1000
-- CPU: 2.8-GHz AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+ dual-core
-- RAM: 2GB
-- Storage: 750GB HD, CD/DVD recorder
-- Monitor: 17-inch, 1440-by-900 LCD, 16.7 million colors

By 1988, personal computers had found their way into about 15 percent of U.S. households. PCs dominated, but other home systems were popular as well--among them the Apple II, Macintosh, Commodore 64, Atari ST, and Amiga 2000.

PCs came with DOS; Windows 2.0 was a $99 option, and one of many competing graphical interfaces. Radio Shack was home PC central, offering the Tandy 1000 TL for $1400 in a configuration that included a 14-inch, 16-color monitor; 640KB of RAM; and a single 3.5-inch floppy drive.

Tandy's DeskMate graphical interface provided an office suite, drawing and sound-editing apps, and PC-Link online software, a precursor to AOL. The 16-color monitor, graphical OS, and multimedia support were cutting-edge in an era still dominated by monochrome monitors and DOS. But the $1400 price didn't cover a mouse, a modem, a network card, or a hard drive, each of which was an expensive add-on. And CD-ROM drives were extremely rare. Microsoft had just released the first version of Bookshelf, a collection of reference materials on CD-ROM in September 1987, and it would be another couple years before the CD-ROM format really took off.

The situation in 2008 almost defies comparison with 1988. Instead of conserving RAM and disk space like gold, we store our entire lives on our hard drives and expect our PCs to double as home entertainment centers. For a total price of $1000, the HP Pavilion Elite m9100z is available with Vista Home Premium, a 750GB hard drive, an HDMI graphics card, Wi-Fi, a CD/DVD recorder, an HDTV tuner, surround sound, and a 17-inch flat-panel monitor.

Where do we go from here? Expect connected everything--from lights to washers to talking mirrors to fridges that make your grocery lists. Instead of a home computer, we'll have a computerized home.

Laptop PCs

1988: Toshiba T1200H
-- Price: $4098 ($7182 adjusted for inflation)
-- CPU: 4.77-/9.54-MHz Intel 80C86
-- RAM: 1MB
-- Storage: 20MB hard drive, 720KB floppy drive
-- Display: 9.4-inch supertwist LCD
-- Weight: 14 pounds (including modem, charger, and case)
-- Battery life: 2 hours

2008: Lenovo ThinkPad X61
-- Price: $1724
-- CPU: 2-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T7300
-- RAM: 2GB
-- Storage: 160GB HD, PC Card slot, SD Card slot, external CD/DVD recorder
-- Display: 12.1-inch 1024-by-768 LCD, 16.7 million colors
-- Weight: 3.6 pounds (6.1 pounds including adapter, ultrabase, and DVD burner)
-- Battery life: 6 hours

Laptops in Toshiba's T1200 series ranked among the most popular of their day, combining very good portability, performance, and value, and were warmly recommended in many reviews, including PC World's. Of course the definition of a "laptop" is different now, and a model that weighed 14 pounds including essential accessories such as a modem and charger would be a nonstarter--or a desktop--today.

That said, LCD laptops represented a major advance in size and weight over the CRT suitcase models that Compaq pioneered. The T1200H was doubly impressive for its 20MB hard drive--a major expense and weight in those days. Adding a 2400-baud modem would cost you another $400 or so.

How have things changed? Well, to start with, you could fit three ThinkPad X61 laptops into the same space that the Toshiba occupied, and you could run any one of those ThinkPads three times longer and many times faster than the T1200H could go. And if you did buy three ThinkPads, you still wouldn't have spent as much as you did on the Toshiba in 1988.

The future trend in portables is to get smaller and thinner, thanks to shrinking component sizes. But you can go only so low with a full-size screen and keyboard, so look for fold-up screens and keyboards that eliminate these size constraints.

Hard Drives

1988: 150MB Core HC150
-- Price: $4995 ($8755 adjusted for inflation)
-- Cost per MB: $33 ($58 adjusted)
-- Seek time: 17ms
-- Controller: ESDI ($495)
-- Data Transfer rate: 1.25 mbps
-- Heads/Disks: 9/5
-- Expected life: 50,000 hours

2008: 1TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11
-- Price: $363
-- Cost per MB: $0.000363
-- Seek time: 9ms
-- Controller: SATA 3Gbps
-- Data Transfer rate: 300 mbps
-- Heads/Disks: 8/4
-- Expected life: 750,000 hours

Hey, want to buy a 1-terabyte hard drive for $5.8 million? We thought not. But based on per-megabyte prices in 1988, that's how much a 1TB drive would have cost in 2008 dollars.

By contrast, today's top-of-the-line 1TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 is one of the fastest drives around and dirt-cheap at just $363. Back in 1988, of course, we didn't have scads of 10-megapixel photos and high-definition video cluttering up our drives, much less entire music libraries. (You can fit about 2500 CDs on a 1TB drive in lossless format, and far more as compressed MP3 files.)

Hard drives perfectly exemplify the law that content expands to occupy available space. In the future, we'll probably continue to fill up every yottabyte and gibibyte that the storage gods bestow on us, even if we have to get a PhD in units of measure to comprehend the volume of space available to us.

But the true game-changer in storage is no longer capacity; it's size. Ever-tinier flash drives provide the data needed for powerful handheld devices, from cameras and smart phones to media players.

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