When I was growing up, I (literally) had to listen to stories from my father, mother, aunts, uncles, and grandparents about how everything was cheaper in the past, how they could get a hamburger for a dime, a gallon of gas for fifteen cents, and a pair of shoes for a buck. The point of every one of these assaults on my pre-consumer-price-index-understanding brain was to illustrate just how spoiled myself, brothers, and cousins were.
Today, I went in to Best Buy and picked up a 2G SD card for my new camera, $22. I thought back and remembered that the very first time I bought computer memory in 1993, I spent over $100 for 256k, at those prices, 2G of RAM would have been in the $800,000 range. (I saved over 3/4 million dollars just by waiting 15 years).
This is what I realized, we will tell the opposite stories to our kids than the old folks told us. Our stories will about how much everything cost us, and how spoiled they are that they get so much more for so little.
Can't wait to be the crotchety old man ... "you kids and your 256 bit wide terraflop multiprocessors. When I was your age had 64k RAM and a 5 1/4 inch floppy drives and we were happy!"
Bonus (probably) unanswerable question: when I was born in 1964, was there 2G worth of volatile memory on the whole planet?
1 comment:
Thoughts:
1) Wow, you're right. We WILL be telling the opposite of the stories our grandparents told us. Fascinating!
2) You were born in 1964???
3) It's refreshing when a man can admit that he has a 5 1/4 inch floppy. :)
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