Fifteen Years of Technology Reporting

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"

Try Popular Science or Popular Mechanics

[ianscot]

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.

$10 a megabyte

[pubjames]

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.

The prices are most shocking

[qseep]

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 time period.

Personally, I was into Commodores 15 years ago. The Amiga 2000 cost abour $2000 when your average PC cost about $5000. I never understood why people would buy PC compatibles back then!