Computer History - Computer Technology and Prices from 1992

I was playing around with my 64gb iPod Touch and it struck me how far technology has come. I thumbed through an old "Computer Shopper" from November 1992 that I have saved. It brought back some fond memories from a time when I a) still had hair, b) was broke raising two young kids, c) used to salivate at all the cool new technology I could not afford.

For instance ...

You could buy a state of the art 486DX system for a mere $2895. To put that amount in perspective, that would be a little over $4500 in todays dollars.

I was still about six months away from upgrading my 286 PC with a 10mb (thats right, 10 megabyte) to a screaming 486sx Packard Bell with a 40mb drive. I recall keeping a spiral notebook adding up all the software on my 286 so I could keep track of how much space I had left for data. Back in those days hard drive space was scarce. One used their 5-1/4" or 3-1/2" floppy drive as the primary means of storing data. The 3-1/2 floppies were great as you could buy double density disks that held a whopping 1.44mb. Today I use a 4gb flash drive I paid $12 for.

I also recall marveling when I bought my 486sx in mid 1993 at how much the prices had come down. It only cost me $599 for the computer and a 40mb drive and 512k (yes that is kb not mb) of memory.


That was no small upgrade for me as it allowed me to start using Windows. On my 286 I used DR DOS as my operating system and a cool DOS task switcher named Deskview. I actually did have a copy of Windows 286 (bet most of you never heard of that version.) It did not hurt working down the street from Microsofts main campus in Redmond that back in the day only consisted of a few buildings.

Yesterday (July 29th, 2010) I bought a 750gb external travel drive for $99. Check out these prices for Seagate drives from November 1992...

A 245 megabyte drive cost $563 dollars! Too rich for my blood.

Hah! You can buy a low end laptop today for $563. Here is a Laptop wannabee from 1992...

Five grand for a 486 with 4mb or ram and a 120mb hard drive. This was a rockin' machine back in 1992. 

In 1992 we were only a decade into the PC revolution. Thanks to Intel and Microsoft and IBM we had come a long way from the PC-AT and PC-XT era. I remember working on PC's in the 80's that had no hard drives. They would come with dual 5-1/4" floppy drives. In one drive you would put your software disk (like Word Perfect) and in the other floppy you would have your data disk. You could store 360k worth of data on these floppies. If you had a double-density drive and disk you got a massive 720k of storage.

CD ROM (RO standing for Read-only) was starting to be sold under the hearding multimedia in later 1992. You could buy a CD Rom Drive for a mere $350.  You could store 650mb of data on them. If you wanted a CD Drive that you could write to it would cost you at least $10,000 and these drives were not available through retail. In fact, even CD ROM drives were not even standard equipment in high end PC's in 1992. I remember getting so stoked at 650mb of storage. "Wow", I  thought, you could store a whole library on one disk. Now we carry devices in our pocket that allow us to make phone calls and can hold movies and our entire music library. We can watch movies and televsion streaming to our laptops across the internet.

I thought this would be an interesting post from an old technology geezer for some of you younger folks that are not old enough to remember the early days of the PC revolution.

Technology sure has come a long way in terms of what you get for the dollar.