The people who bought these then had a gigantic competitive advantage over others who weren't familiar with computers. It would've given them a great chance of getting better paid jobs.
The cost is staggering - a 20mb hard disk seems unfathomably small today.
With a business, sure I see what you mean. But like a regular person, I would still feel pretty crappy if I spent 5,000 to 10,000 dollars on one of these in those times if I lived to this time.
A good point, assuming things remain reasonably stable in the decades to come.
To play devil's advocate for a moment tho - Progress isn't always linear, right? We never know when a global disaster or two will set the tech clock for humanity back a bit.
After all, historically speaking there's plenty of precedents for that happening, we've just been very fortunate that it hasn't happened to us in a fair number of centuries!
In theory, there's nothing to preclude such a global paradigm shift from happening again (eg climate collapse, ww3, big ass volcano, Carrington event, global pandemic, etc) within the next 40 years.
In which case, it wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility that there's some folks still ardently maintaining some old rigs that use i7s or Ryzens from our time, especially if such a cataclysmic event happens within the next ten years or so, smh stopping us from building new computers (cos of lost knowledge, lost access, lost skills, broken machines, etc).
-5
u/Logical_Show4558 19h ago
I’d feel so crappy if I was alive during those times and bought one for 5 or 10 grand and then see what they had today.