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It's funny. Laugh. The Media

Fifteen Years of Technology Reporting 182

Posted by michael from the $8990-cheap dept.
jeffdsimpson writes "PC World NZ is 15 years old this month and they've written a story looking back at some of the statements made in the magazine over the years. Some gems include 'The past 10 years have seen a dramatic increase in clock rates, from just under 5MHz for the original IBM PC to 33MHz for the latest 386 systems. This more than six-fold increase will not be repeated' from July 1989 and 'The Internet Connection Company of New Zealand (ICONZ) offers full internet access and charges $50 a megabyte for email, and $10 a megabyte for all other information sent or received' from April 1994"
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Fifteen Years of Technology Reporting More

Fifteen Years of Technology Reporting

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  • nice (Score:3, Insightful)

    by mpost4 ( 115369 ) * on Thursday July 22, 2004 @09:20AM (#9768938) Homepage Journal
    it is nice when a company can take a pop shot at its self. You have to respect the magazine for showing some of those comments.
    • but they got this bit dead right September 1995 Are you ready for Windows 95? "Windows 3 it's not. Windows 95 is brimming with new features, from a redesigned interface to long file names. Click the Start button to launch applications ... " ... according to Microsoft, Windows 95 will run on a 386 with 4MB of RAM. Our verdict: don't try this at home."
      • Nice, but hardly Nostradamus territory there. Microsoft has been low-balling minimum requirements since DOS 4.0, I don't think anyone ever really considered a 386 to be acceptable for Win95.
      • March 2001
        Classic Dumb Terminal
        "It's ridiculous claiming that video games influence children. For instance, if Pac-man affected kids born in the 80s, we should by how have a bunch of teenagers who run around in darkened rooms and eat pills while listening to monotonous electronic music."

        Finally. Someone knows why Raves and Ecstasy (The drug, not the feeling) are so popular.

    • erm, it's "pot shots." thank you!

      or, if you really mean pop shots, i'd love to know what that means, so that i may spread the message.

      do not take this as just another OCD spelling spazz. i'm not pissed, just trying to be helpful. thank you, come again.

    • Re:nice (Score:3, Funny)

      by rf0 ( 159958 )
      Recently a mag in the UK they showed a modded PC fully kitted our in neons, cooling kits, see through side panel etc saying prehaps it was the fastest PC they tested. The next month they had to admit that prehaps it would be better if the picture they printed actually had a cpu on the mb

      Rus

    • Did you mean "pot shot" [wordsmyth.net]?
      • Sorry to reply here, but the discussion we where having here:

        http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=113251& c id =9594082

        doesn't allow comments to be posted anymore.

        Anyway, in answer to the question you asked right at the end, the answer is of course yes. It's called CNC (computer numeric control) and basically you program the millhead's (or lathe, or rapid prototyping unit's) movements, insert the material and there you go: tolerances up to and including ten thousanths of a centimeter, every time (o

        • Point taken, and it is a good one.

          I guess I'm from the cruder side of engineering where a carefully calibrated whack with a hammer to fix things is often good enough in the field (although if you wander around my website you'll see some interesting, complicated stuff).

          I've always wondered if "piping design" is similar to motherboard circuit design. With the former there are multiple fluids/pressures/temperatures to contend with. PCB design would seem to be relatively simple, but what do I know?

          After

  • it's getting very close to a slashdotting (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    (what is it with humor stories? everyone jumps on them)
    PC World at 15
    It was 5475 days ago today, or thereabouts, that your favourite computer magazine first hit newsstands. PC World lifer Chris Keall looks back on the laughter, the tears and the $24,000 386.

    Chris Keall
    Monday, 28 June, 2004

    Since it first appeared as a standalone magazine in 1989 (having done time in the trenches as a Computerworld supplement), PC World has chronicled the highs, the lows and the sometimes keyboard-pounding agony that is the
  • full internet access and charges $50 a megabyte for email, and $10 a megabyte for all other information sent or received

    I would be paying a fortune for my connection
    • If email was still charged at $50 (32USD ATM) per megabyte the spam problem might be sorted very quickly (or it would never have happened in the first place).
      • To show the negative side as well:
        Neither would have Linux

        (Who didn't download a distribution here?)
        • The $50 was only for international traffic, traffic within NZ was charged at significantly lower rates (or not at all). The Universities got their traffic significantly cheaper, so what would usually happen was that Linux (and other useful free software) would get mirrored on one of the University ftp servers and everyone else would download from there. Binary newsgroups were also useful for more than just warez and porn in those days. The other tricks we used to use were to PASV FTP something onto the Univ
          • and to use FTP via email gateways (which usually took several days to get the file to you in chunks) to take advantage of the price differential.

            I'm misremembering, and misreading the grandparent's quote from the article. I'm not sure that we were ever charged a different price for email and other traffic (our internet connection predated commericial ISP's like ICONZ, so we were getting billed $4/Mb for our international traffic directly from Waikato University). The FTP by email thing was from before we

      • No, I think spam would still have happened. But it would have killed off public email. Email would be purely an internal business thing - away from the space (and money) hogging spam.
        • With email prices that high, it would still have been more expensive than snail mail, meaning that a lot fewer people would have used it. Those that did use it would be either tech-savvy people, or those with problems that require fast exchange of electronic information - not exactly a good market for spam.
      • What kind of solution is that? Should we make plane tickets cost $250,000 a seat to stop terrorism?
    • Except that way back then you only had smaller harddisks, no images in emails (or browsers for that matter), and there was no spam. Even my University didn't have email.
    • And in NZ they still pay 2 much for internet access.
      • Honestly. Is it too much to ask for you to type "too" rather than 2?

        The only reason you could be excused for writing 2, is if you're writing a text message with a mobile phone that lacks predictive text messaging. You're not doing that. Get a clue.

  • Why?! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Dausha ( 546002 )

    From the article

    Windows 3 is more than an update. In many respects it's an entirely new environment ... To really take advantage of Windows, you'll want either a fast 286 or a 386 machine, preferably with at least 2MB of RAM. Enhanced mode allows you to run multiple DOS applications.

    So, why can't Microsoft duplicate this feat with Win2k3? I'd like to see them fit it into a 2 MB footprint, or 20 MB.

    Reminds me that I stepped into the x86 world in July of '93. I bought an AST 486/25 SX with one meg. on-bo

    • Re:Why?! (Score:3, Informative)

      by sporty ( 27564 )
      The same reason the NT boot discs (to boot strap the cd boot process) was 3 floppies. Drivers drivers drivers.

      Also, let's not forget a modern monitor supports 1024x768 x 32bit colour easily. Keeping your wallpaper in memory costs at least 2 megs of ram. No I didn't calculate that. I think it comes to ~3 megs. Windows has more support + services to support the support than you can shake a stick at.

      I'ms ure if you went with a fine tooth combe though, you can get it to work on lower end machines.

      • Not to mention the fact that Windows 3 didn't support protected memory or pre-emptive multitasking, two features most people consider to be required for a modern operating system.
      • I think my first experience seeing a monitor with 1024x768 was in 1990. A guy i knew had a Tandy 286 clone that could display Cshow GIFs in 1024x768, but I think with only 16 colors. Ahead of its time, IMO.
    • What in the parent made this a troll?!

  • I realize why I don't read PC world (Score:4, Insightful)

    by poptones ( 653660 ) on Thursday July 22, 2004 @09:25AM (#9768986) Journal
    There was an article in BYTE back in the mid 80s that pretty much nailed where we would be at in ten years. it was a little conservative in memory and hard drive specs, but not nearly so off base as the article here.

    Why do people read these things, anyways? PC World is nothing but a catalog of buzzwords and hype. Always was.

    • Why do people read these things, anyways? PC World is nothing but a catalog of buzzwords and hype. Always was.

      Interesting - I've only read a few PC Worlds (I'm UK-based so my magazine consumption tends towards the UK and US) but it struck me as relatively practical, and mercifully buzz-word free. Was I just lucky with those issues?

      (Off-topic: any other NZ/Australian/Asia-Pacific magazines anyone would recommend?)

  • It just goes to show, no one can predict anything with any sort of accuracy. Those who rely on such predictions for action, caveat emptor!
    • *points to Moore's Law He seems to have done a pretty good job of it!
    • Better to go into everything blindly? How does that make any sense? Just because some predictions (maybe even most) are wrong doesn't mean that we should try to predict anything.

      Here's an example:

      Apple predicts it is going to sell X iPods so they start manufacturing expecting to meet that demand (or in Apple's case it often seems to fall just short of that demand to create false demand but that is another story). When the iPods become wildly popular they sell far more than X. While the prediction was

  • The more things change (Score:3, Funny)

    by foidulus ( 743482 ) * on Thursday July 22, 2004 @09:29AM (#9769020)
    the more they stay the same. I think their nerd quotient is still as applicible today as it was 12 years ago:
    How can I tell if I am a nerd?
    "Subtract the number of girlfriends/boyfriends/wives/husbands you've had from the number of computers you have owned. If the number is positive, you are a nerd."
    Damn, I'm at +5....

  • Try Popular Science or Popular Mechanics (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ianscot ( 591483 ) on Thursday July 22, 2004 @09:31AM (#9769027)
    I think both those magazines still regularly throw in a page with articles from 1, 5, 10, or however many years ago.

    No news source is ever going to own up to its really spectacular gaffes, though. I'm going off to our family cabin this weekend. There are lots of old Popular Sciences there -- I think my grandfather's -- from the early 1950s. Sample article, paraphrased:

    How We'll Reach the Moon!
    1. Develop nuclear missiles to shoot at the moon. This will help us work on guidance systems. We need nuclear explosions to know when we hit it.
    2. ...

    (And yeah, that's a real example.)

    Popular Mechanics from back in the day has a lot of do-it-yourself projects that would kill anyone who tried them. Example: Make a "backpack" for your car from plywood, clip it on with a couple of cheap latches, and let your kids travel cross country back there. That one stuck in my mind, but there are many others.

    The ones they'll admit to in articles like this are like the Popular Mechanics article from the cabin about bizarre new cars from Europe: Front Wheel Drive? Seatbelts that go across your shoulder? They'll never catch on, because surveys done by Ford show Americans want bigger and bigger vehicles.

    • (And yeah, that's a real example.)

      Here's my favorite example [milk.com]. I have five, soon to be six kids. I need this now!
      • Ha! What you need is that little Honda wagon pretending to be an SUV -- with the hoseable interior. Oops, not enough seats -- but it's getting a little closer to the cartoon, I have to admit. I'm just surprised they didn't work in radiation or nuclear materials of some sort. "Water simply boils off this couch -- providing a convenient source of energy for the many modern kitchen appliances." They always work in the radiation when they can.
    • This is why I love reading old science fiction short stories from the 40's-60's. Some of the ideas about how things will be done in the future are risible nowadays (one of my favorites is people travelling in spaceships reading microfilm, I see that a lot) and some are amazingly spot-on, like one I read about a future where the consumer culture results in a future where poor people are fat and live in homes cluttered with crap they're compelled to buy, and rich people are thin and live simple lives (can't r
    • surveys done by Ford show Americans want bigger and bigger vehicles.

      Well I guess at least Ford got it right...
      • If you think about it, taste in car size swings back and forth pretty radically. Fashion's going to do that I guess.

        Meantime Ford's share of the overall market plummeted next to Japanese makers who weren't even in the picture in my old magazines. Honda and Toyota came into the market in the 70s with the compact commuter car. Volkswagens before them, too, with the original Beetle (and the first minivan, which we never really acknowledge). And Ford, with its surveys showing Americans wanted bigger boat seda

  • I'm hoping all the $'s are NZD's (New Zealand Dollars). One NZD is roughly 0.6 USD by the way.

  • Looking back, sometimes is scary (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 22, 2004 @09:40AM (#9769073)

    Fifteen Years of Technology Reporting

    In general, And still no expose on price fixing and monopoly abuse, still no coverage of fundamental research in both software and hardware, just the same copy and paste press release stories. No undercover journalism, no coverage of the spamming and malware writing "bad" parts of PC town. Still the same meaningless benchmarks and megahurts ads for articles. No coverage of the scary moves by the once garage operation and now mega coorporations. No credit where credit is due for real inovation, no mention of the real inventors of "the next cool thing", just of the latest guy to market a clone years later.

    Overall I really hope that the dead tree coverage is better elseware in this world. Beside the likes of el`reg [theregister.co.uk] and vulture HQ [theinquirer.net] only C`t [heise.de] seems to have some grip with what is going on. At slashdot we often joke about the dumbed down (or plain dumb) coverage by "normal" news sources (cnn/nyt), but the dedicated dead tree rags basicly have no journalism/real news whatsoever.

    Sure its more complicated then this, but when looking back, do you see improvement over the years?

    • i don't think things will ever improve all that much in print IT media.

      what's the point of publishing an in-depth magazine when the information therein will be common knowledge long before you even go to press?
    • just the same copy and paste press release stories

      (I cut and pasted that text, incidentally.)

      Back when I worked at a major modern art museum, we had the two large local papers essentially parroting back our press releases about new shows as "reviews." These were big time journalists covering areas in which their subjective opinions were an accepted, encouraged part of their columns. They showed less intellectual curiosity than most fifth graders I know, at least in print. It was mostly about playing it

  • Yeah, I mean, if those processor trends continued, we'd be seeing crazy processing speeds now - 300, 400 Mhz. RAM and hard drives, just wouldn't be able to keep up.

  • $10 a megabyte (Score:3, Interesting)

    by pubjames ( 468013 ) on Thursday July 22, 2004 @09:46AM (#9769112)

    If you have a satellite internet connection (which you might need in places where the telephone service is very poor, in parts of Africa for instance) then you will pay around $10 a megabyte today if you pay as you go.

    I have a friend who pays this much, so I always keep my emails to him short, and don't attach a sig.
    • What's his e-mail? I'd love to send him a little message.

      Lib_of_Congr_backup_07-22-2004.zip

    • "short" email

      ------------------------
      Hey [insertname],
      Just a short note to say hi!
      Heres the file you wanted.
      James.
      Attached: Redhat_dvd.iso
      ------------------------

      I know your being thoughtful and kind to your friend, but an extra page of text isn't going to break his piggy bank, and it will help with his signal/spam ratio.
    • I have a friend who pays this much, so I always keep my emails to him short, and don't attach a sig.

      This reminds me of an incident back in '95 or so when a friend of mine sent out one of those chain emails, "Can you guess what 80s song these lyrics are from?" to a group of about 10 of us. The email got replied to and attached to and sent to the whole group several times as people tried to answer the quiz.

      Finally, one guy sent an email to the group asking everyone to please remove his email address from f

  • Interesting! (Score:2, Redundant)

    by OS24Ever ( 245667 ) *
    March 2001
    Classic Dumb Terminal
    "It's ridiculous claiming that video games influence children. For instance, if Pac-man affected kids born in the 80s, we should by how have a bunch of teenagers who run around in darkened rooms and eat pills while listening to monotonous electronic music."

    Isn't that a rave?
    • yes, and you have NO IDEA how many times that line pops up on raver forums and such.

      some people attribute it to a nintendo power editor
      • oh... is that joke still funny here, on the moon we have progressed far beyond your level of "pac-man" jokes

        WE ARE FUNNY! SPACE INVADERS JOKES OWN YOU BITCHES! HA!

        settle down err.....

        [adult swim]
      • Ah, bummer, here I thought I was being original. I guess that is what I get for staying at home all the time with the family.

  • July 1997
    The empire strikes back: IE 4.0
    "Internet Explorer 4 promises a change that Netscape may be unable to match: it lets you integrate the browser directly into the operating system. A copy of IE 4 will be included in every copy of Memphis (Windows 98), the Windows 95 successor due in early next year."

    Ah, that brings back memories... A solid move from MS to kill off it's competition. I haven't thought about windows without a browser for a couple of years now, and from the looks of things now, I'l


  • "..from just under 5MHz for the original IBM PC to 33MHz for the latest 386 systems. "

    Just imagine a beowulf cluster of these!

  • What does this teach us about the future? (Score:3, Informative)

    by mt-biker ( 514724 ) on Thursday July 22, 2004 @10:10AM (#9769260)
    CERN has a commitee by the name of PASTA which tracks computer technology, making predictions of future growth.

    I remember reading the first such report in 1996, and finding predictions of 500GB disks in PCs for the year 2006 somewhat inconceivable. There were similar results for CPUs and memory.

    I just had a quick look on the CERN website and found their latest report (2002) [home.cern.ch]. There's a lot of information in there, much of it quite technical, and I'm in a rush so let me leave the interested to read it, and I'll just make a few points:

    - The predictions they've been making for the last 8 years have turned out to be much too conservative in some fields.
    - KCHF and MCHF stand for kilo-swiss-francs (803 USD) and mega-swiss-francs (803,000 USD). Yes, the people there really think in these numbers. They're scientists. :)
    - LHC is the next generation of CERN experiments, due to go online now in (I believe) 2007. As far as data aquisition goes: "A peak rate of 1000 MBytes/s is required, and capacity for 5000 TB per year. This is a rather minimal requirement in terms of drives. In practice, support for ~2.5 GBytes/s might be needed at LHC startup"

  • From the article:

    Self-aware computers
    Even after 60 years of development, computers are still basically machines that can only crunch an endless stream of ones and zeros. Although several research projects are focusing on imbuing computers with reasoning and decision-making cognition - one has been under way for 20 years - that remains a holy grail for computer science. [emphasis mine]

    I've long dismissed computers ever being self-aware. As I've heard before, "The subject of whether or not a compu

    • Re:Interesting tidbit... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Laur ( 673497 )
      The barrier isn't a matter of complexity or understanding per se, but rather the fact that good judgement and self-awareness are the result of a spiritual, rather than mechanical or chemical, process. You won't ever find these traits in an entirely mechanical process.

      And you have scientific evidence for this right? You wouldn't be spouting off your own personal opinions as fact now would you?

    • You forgot the magic words:

      I believe...

      Your beliefs in a soul or spiritual component to human existence are only beliefs. They are not scientific fact and should not be presented as such.

      K

    • Re:Interesting tidbit... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Have Blue ( 616 ) on Thursday July 22, 2004 @10:47AM (#9769529) Homepage
      You are an entirely mechanical process. So am I. Computers are simply not yet fast or capacious enough to mimic us, and some fundamental breakthroughs in our knowledge of a mind's operation apparently remain to be made, but one day there will be a thinking "machine". It's inevitable.

    • Re:Interesting tidbit... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by mblase ( 200735 ) on Thursday July 22, 2004 @10:51AM (#9769580)
      Computers weren't designed to think; they were designed to follow instructions.

      That was then, this is now. Today humans constantly ask computers to do the thinking for them. My car has dashboard lights that tell me if my engine needs servicing or my oil need replacing; gone are the myriad dials that I would have to interpret myself. Stoplights are connected to sensors and to each other in order to optimize rush-hour traffic flow.

      And that's just at the consumer level. Power plants and grids rely on systems designed not only to regulate power, but shut it down if necessary. PC software does "intelligent" background searches to locate information related to whatever I'm typing or reading. Most of the systems in a large airplane are automated because it would be impossible for a human to react quickly enough to maintain them.

      The real problem with intelligent computers is that computers are still designed to live in a world of absolutes, truth and falsehood, and people never do. We don't learn about the world from logic, but instead we create logic to analyze the world. Human (and animal) brains learn by identifying patterns, and then observing when those patterns are broken. Computers are built around patterns and then, when those break, so do the computers.

      Self-awareness is a property that the soul impinges on the mind, not an inherent property of neurons.

      This is a metaphysical question, entirely unprovable, and one that real researchers try to avoid.
    • biological constructs have had billions of years of natural selection thrashing around nucleotide sequences to produce what we now see as varying levels of intelligence and awareness.

      Computer (and robotic) technology has been around how long? 60 or so years in practice?
    • that good judgement and self-awareness are the result of a spiritual, rather than mechanical or chemical, process

      As said elsewhere, that (and pretty much everything else in your post) is your belief, not a scientific statement.

      You obviously believe it though. Now, if your belief is mistaken, this suggests a conspiracy. Specifically, your neurons have something to hide and are trying to cover it up by making "you" believe this. I suggest retaliation- specifically, kill those pesky neurons by blowing you
  • " ... according to Microsoft, Windows 95 will run on a 386 with 4MB of RAM. Our verdict: don't try this at home."

    I remember installing it on my home computer, a 386 sx (no math co) 25MHz, 20MB Harddisk and 4 MB RAM. Yes I had to install diskdouble and set default free space reporting to 3x to bypass pre-installation HD space checking by the installer.
  • 15 years ago. 1989. One thing this article can't pick up on due to it being a PC magazine is the amount of platform diversity there was then. In 1989 I had an ST I think. The Amigas were going strong, and the C64 was hanging on in there by its fingertips. The magazine awards best PC to a Mac IIcx. In the UK at least, there were things such as the Amstrad PCW range - CPM-based (I believe) green screen business machines that did well for themselves as straight wordprocessing devices. Then slowly it all died
    • 15 years ago. 1989. One thing this article can't pick up on due to it being a PC magazine is the amount of platform diversity there was then.

      In 1989 I had an ST I think. The Amigas were going strong, and the C64 was hanging on in there by its fingertips. The magazine awards best PC to a Mac IIcx. In the UK at least, there were things such as the Amstrad PCW range - CPM-based (I believe) green screen business machines that did well for themselves as straight wordprocessing devices.

      Then slowly it all died

    • Gates promised us that software not hardware would limit performance. He has worked to make it so. Hardware was made a commodity and he is working to make sure that it will only eat his software. Fifteen years ago, hardware was made everywhere. Now, not even IBM or big Japanese companies can make hardware with anything but slave labor in China.

      Free software might not make it possible to compete with slave labor, but it will help. If the largest cost of hardware becomes the "IP" of BIOS and software, f

  • X-Rated Picture (Score:4, Funny)

    by barryfandango ( 627554 ) on Thursday July 22, 2004 @10:34AM (#9769410)

    "A telephone connection can transport you from one bulletin board to another [...] We were able to download an X-rated picture, no questions asked."

    WHAT'S THE NUMBER PLEASE POST

  • this one's a pisser:

    "Yes, Compaq is first to our shores with a Pentium-based PC - the $8750 ex GST 5/60M. The '5' is to remind a few of us that this is actually a 586 even if Intel insists we all speak Latin."

    bakakakakakakakaaaaaaaaaaaa

  • Their predictions on clock speed actually aren't that far off the mark, assuming they're talking about the system clock as a whole rather than just the CPU clock speed.

    When the 486's came out shortly after that article in 1989, the fastest speed they got up to was still only 33MHz. By applying clock doubling, Intel was able to get the DX2 CPUs running at 66MHz internally -- but externally mainboard speeds were still 33.

    In fact, mainboard speeds STILL peaked at 33MHz when the first generation of Pentiums
    • Wrong wrong wrong. The P-90 was a 1.5x multiplied 60MHz bus. The pentinum came in 3 bus speeds:

      50MHz - P-50, p-75
      60MHz - P-60, p-90, p-120
      66MHz - P-66, P-100, P-133, P-166, P-200, P-233

      I might be wrong about the P-100. Ars Technica agrees with me: see here [arstechnica.com].

      Note that the fastest 486s were AMD parts - their 486DX went up to 40 MHz, and the "486DX4" (clock tripled, not 4x as the name would imply") had 100MHz and 120 MHz versions!
    • Yes, along the lines of what Craig was mentioning:

      Before the early 90s, Intel's processors had always had a bus speed matched with the processor speed. The problem was, Intel was hitting the wall as far as bus speeds with current technology, with the 486DX 40, 50 and the Pentium 60, 66 rounding out the high-end. Thus, there was a push in the early 90s for internal speed multipliers.

      Intel got a lot of flack for this move, but they were able to price the DX2/SX2 and P75 parts quite attractively. Also, the

  • Slashdot Archives! (Score:3, Informative)

    by jasno ( 124830 ) on Thursday July 22, 2004 @12:34PM (#9770702) Journal
    Lately I've started going back and viewing the slashdot headlines from 5 years ago. Its really hilarious to go back and see where we've been.

    Here's a start:
    1 Year [slashdot.org]
    2 Years [slashdot.org]
    5 Years [slashdot.org]

    Modifying the URL to go to an arbitrary day is easy. Just modify the YYYYMMDD code in the URL:
    http://slashdot.org/index.pl?issue=19990722

    It would be nice to see the /. editors put together some slash-way-back stories to dig deeper into some of the more popular fads and see where they're at now.
  • "May 2002 Next generation PDAs "Aside from the Springboard expansion slot, the $999 Handspring Visor Pro's standout features include an LED alarm option and a backlit, 16-greyshade screen.""

    Ummm, $999 Handspring Visor Pro? Methinks not...

  • Back in the early 80's a "Nixie Tube" manufacturer's rep had an article saying that the LED display would never become low cost enough to replace the nixie tube neon display.

  • The Rules of Future Predictions (Score:3, Funny)

    by MonkeyCookie ( 657433 ) on Thursday July 22, 2004 @02:44PM (#9772142)
    1. No matter what you predict in the future, you will be horribly wrong.

    2. The people in the future will mercilessly mock you for it.
  • Having lived through that 15-year era, I have to say that while I don't bat an eye at the MHz or MB ratings of equipment, the prices reported back then are astoundingly high.

    They are talking about $28,000 PCs... who the heck would ever pay that much for a PC? They talk about $3,000 as a "breakthrough" when today you can grab an average system for $1,000 or less.

    I would be curious to see a price trend chart over the years, of the "high-end PC", "average PC" and "bargain PC", whatever that meant in each ti

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