Down memory lane

Tom Sangala October 25, 2017

486 2 minutes read

“Technologies come and go, sure, yet have you noticed how some of the most promising products hit the market but soon fade and disappear without explanation?” John C. Dvorak, Pc Magazine, November 7, 1995.

How long have you been a citizen of the tech planet? If you have been around for some time, you have probably noticed that while many technologies left the scene before the merrymaking was ever over, overall, the price of technology has been plummeting at astronomical rates.

In the April 1992 edition of Personal Computer Magazine (UK version) an add conjures my hilarity: an Intel 486 DX 66 PC, with low-cut 8 MB memory and parking, in today’s lexicon, petite 40 MB hard disk dons an oversized price tag of £ 3,995.

Three years down the line, you could pay less than half of £ 3,995 and get yourself a Dell Latitude laptop Notebook 100 MHZ Intel Pentium, 8 MB Memory, Running Windows 95. (PC Magazine, USA, November 7, 1995)

Intel boosted the Pentium computer chip with multimedia extension (MMX) in 1997. The hullabaloo from Intel was like all of a sudden the Pentium processor had inhaled chamba (Indian hemp); and now would handle music and video indefatigably. While processor speeds had improved to 200 MHz and memory rose steeply to 32 MB and disk capacities hit the gigabyte regions, MMX had the audacity to push prices up to $ 3,159 (PC Magazine, USA Edition, July 1997).

In 1999 the techie world was hit with a plague, the millennium bug; computers would roll back and cause havoc in bank and accounting systems. You would wake up on January 1, 2000 and discover that the $100 you owed the bank had exponentially amplified and became a million dollar. So, we were told.

Academically, the millennium bug should have pushed prices up, but PC builders went for volumes. This is why PC Computing of July 1999 showed a Gateway 433 MHz, 64 MB RAM, 8GB hard disk capacity, Windows 98 bundled with Corel Word Perfect Suite going for only $1,299.

A number of brilliant pieces of software left the scene without bidding goodbye. Lotus 123 was miles away from Excel; where did it go? And what happened to the award-winning AmiPro wordprocesor?

Does anybody still stock the PDA-Phone Nokia E90 in tech museums? That was the iPhone of those years. Styled like a small handbook diary and naturally opened like one, exposing a full-fledged QTWERY keyboard and a scroll-bar, E90 was an e-diary that could make phone calls.

In 2001, Steve Jobs introduced iPod; a musical player endowed with 5 GB hard disk. It had enough space for 1,000 songs and played other musical formats other than just MP3. In 2007, iPod started making phone calls and Steve Jobs called it iPhone. Before he died in 2009, Steve Jobs gifted the world with what would be his last novelty, an iPod that made calls and was bigger and surfed the net in mazing ways; and could let you read books by electronically flipping pages. He called it iPad.

Today, you do not need a digital camera, camcorder, PDA, phone or tablet, all you ever need is either Samsung Galaxy Note 8 or iPhone X; and just for $1,000 or under. Thanks Steve!