Way OT: the price of progress

Yup, we all have stashes of stuff the junkman doesn't want to take away (it is now hazardous waste in my office).

But I would hate to have stayed with my 3 6 foot drafting tables.

Now, everything I used to hold in all those shelf racks, file cabinets,

4 foot wide drawing drawers and drafting tables is in my Dell M60 & my Apple Powerbook.

I like the changes.

Bo

Art Woodbury wrote:

Oh, I like the changes, too. Can't imagine going on "the board" again, which for me was about 18 years ago.

I was just re-stating Moore's Law, and being a bit awestruck at how fast, powerful and cheap electronic design tools have become.

AW

I think the thing that blows me away was the cost of RAM. Back in 1993 I had

4 MB and to upgrade to 8 it cost $200. Good grief!

That and I am also amazed at how much companies paid for early CAD systems. $10,000. What were they thinking???

Brings back memories - in 1986 I was in the middle of an undergraduate course in Mech Eng at Imperial in London and they just started a CAD familiarisation course. SDRC I think was the company that made the software and each Monitor alone was over £40,000 each, let alone the computer that that did the work - All we could do was make a few cubes and put holes in in it !!! - Next door was the Main Frame and it still used punch cards !! and we did simple FEA work on it using Maths that I can't even begin to write the symbols now, all I remeber is two names a Mr Runger and Mr Cutter ( I hope I remeber thier names correctly ) and their equation or was that Fluid Dynamics !! . Still I remember our Professor of Stress Analysis who used to consult to HMGovernment about stresses in nuclear power stations advising us all not to live anywhere near one, and that was before Homer got a job at Springfield !!

I hope all had a peacefull Easter

TTFN

Jonathan

I spelt their ( his ) name incorrectly

I am now in a cold sweat and having soome very bad memories

Jonathan

$10k was *cheap*. When I decided to bark with the big dogs in late '94 the price to get off the porch was $40k for I-DEAS Master Series and an SGI workstation. (Soon to grow most of another $10k for more RAM, CD reader, tape backup etc.)

$6k in todays inflated money buys a seat of SW and a decent box that together will run circles around the high-end stuff of 10 years ago.

Ain't progress great? :)

AW

Progress is great. The software is great. The problem is that people will still expect more for less when it comes to software. I've been working on SW since 98+ and remember a lot of the headaches from waaay back then.

I will still take the daily crash or two with the 3X's as fast computer, 8X's as much RAM, exponentially more functions in SW over the days of 1 hole per hole wizard feature, the BSOD over copying text for hole tables, and other various things I don't have to worry about today.

There are so many more features I use now in 1 or 2 steps vs. the 6-10 step work-arounds to make things look pretty back then.

Oh yeah, we more than made up the cost of SW and all the hardware in less than 18 months with just sheetmetal unfolding features(= non-f'ups) back on 98+. We were using CADDS5 3D wireframe which was more expensive (just in maintainence), ran on over priced UNIX machines, and you had to go through 5-6 drop down menus to draw a circle.

Yeah, SW sucks.....please note sarcasm.

Later kids.