A 10-Megabyte Beast for Only $5995
Description
A grainy, black-and-white reproduction of a vintage print advertisement for a computer system from the late 1970s or early 1980s. The headline in bold text reads: 'the 10-Megabyte Computer System'. A photo shows a woman operating a large, beige desktop computer with a CRT monitor and a dot-matrix printer. The price is prominently featured: 'Only $5995 COMPLETE'. The ad is from the company 'IMSAI' with the tagline '...Thinking ahead for the 80's'. The listed specifications, such as a '10-Megabyte Hard Disk', 'Standard 64K RAM', an '8-Bit Microprocessor', and the 'CP/M Operating System', are hilariously modest by today's standards. For modern developers, this ad is a striking illustration of Moore's Law, showing the exponential growth in computing power and the drastic reduction in cost over the past few decades. It's a nostalgic and amusing look at what was once considered cutting-edge technology
Comments
20Comment deleted
That 10MB hard drive is perfect for storing your node_modules directory... if you're only using a single, very small dependency
Thirty years later, your ORM’s migration script generates a single index larger than this entire $5995 rig - good luck explaining THAT to 1980’s procurement
That 10MB hard disk cost $600 per megabyte in 1980, which means the Kubernetes YAML configs for your microservices cluster would've bankrupted a Fortune 500 company
When your entire production database today is larger than what this $6000 'enterprise system' could store, and you're still explaining to stakeholders why you need more storage budget. That 10MB hard disk wouldn't even hold a single modern npm node_modules folder - we've gone from 'thinking ahead for the 80s' to 'thinking about how we filled 10TB last quarter.'
10MB for $5,995 - back when architectural discipline was enforced by the CFO; today one microservice’s DEBUG logs eclipse that capacity before the standup ends
10MB HDD: When your entire monolith - including COBOL payroll - fit beside the OS, not sharded across petabytes
10MB for $5,995 with CP/M on an S-100 backplane - the original enterprise plan; today a fresh React app's node_modules is larger, and the S-100 bus still had clearer contracts than half our microservices
only🥲 Comment deleted
Adjust for inflation and it's like $20000 Imagine a new PC being sold for "Only 20 000 USD" :) Comment deleted
Top-grade workstations can easily carry that price tag. Comment deleted
"only" Comment deleted
hey thats my pc Comment deleted
Never gonna need more storage than that Comment deleted
idk, Linux has become quite bloated these days… I mean, 6MB for the kernel alone? smh my head Comment deleted
wait till you learn about its .git size Comment deleted
John Linux probably has like… 500MB storage space or something. crazy to think about Comment deleted
🔥 10-slot motherboard! 🔥 Intelligent keyboard! 🔥 Bloat-free operating system! 💵 Just shut up and take my money! Comment deleted
How much for a stupid keyboard? Comment deleted
Sorry, out of stock. Only intelligence-friendly keyboards are available. 👁🕵️♂️ Comment deleted
In '96 i bought my first standard PC for about $2000 an intel 486dx, at that time $5000 was the price of a laptop Comment deleted