Moore's Law* in action

Opening boxes and drawers to get supplies for a knitting project, I came across a brittle, rolled up, yellowed piece of newsprint that had wrapped some sort of goody. When I opened it, there was no goody except for this ad from another world that is now long gone and far away. Just imagine -- for $650 you could buy part of a computer -- just add a couple of 8 inch disc drives, power supply, an enclosure, CRT and you have a total Business System for about 1/3 the cost you might expect to pay. All of 64 K memory (that's kilo -- not mega or giga, guys). Runs at 2.5 MHz (compared to a speed of 400 MHz on yesterday's candy-colored iMac that is the loaner I'm currently using.) And not one word about such niceties as a keyboard to do a little input!

Just for comparison's sake, here is a Dell advert that came with the Courier the other day.What a difference 26 years can make; the ad at the top appeared in the May 1981 Computer Shopper. Of course by that date, the LH had long since built our own home brew computer and logged on to any number of bulletin boards -- precursors to today's slick Internet. In fact, in that same year, Adam Osborne introduced his computer prepackaged with word processor, spreadsheet and (later) database. As I recall, we bought me my first Osborne in 1982. The romance with computers has continued all these years!

*Original statement by Gordon Moore's (of Intel): The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year ... Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years. The statement was made, believe it or not, in 1965 and commentators continue to speculate how much longer the exponential growth in computing power and capacity will continue.