A friend offered a six-year-old computer to our church, and I jokingly asked him what that was in human years. He shot back, "140." As Neo says, whoa.
If six equals 140, then I've owned at least one computer for almost half a millennium and I've bought or built a new one about every human lifetime. I hesitate to ask how long my friend, who wrote a thesis on mathematical psychology somewhere in the mists of time, has been around these things.
When I started buying computers for myself, in 1992, the Packard Bell I picked up was $1,200 if I recall correctly (I got it from Sears, maxing out what was also my first credit card). The second computer I got (in 1996) was $1,800, mostly because of a big honkin' 17" monitor (the Holstein-decorated boxes at my new New Orleans pad clued my dad into the fact that I'd blown almost all of my separation pay on the thing). The third computer I built myself in 1999, using $1,800 in parts. The fourth (2001) was $1,200 in parts so I could pass most of the existing system to my wife. The fifth (2004) was also about $1,200 in parts, mostly a dual-core 64-bit processor and two 200 GB hard drives. The sixth was a laptop for $550 in 2007. The seventh was a microtower for $360 last year. (The last two were Office Depot purchases, so I paid for people in red shirts constantly asking me if I was finding what I was looking for, but time was a factor and home-building wasn't an option.)
That list doesn't include the Tandy Model III my dad brought home on loan one summer that had Logo on it, the Commodore 64 he bought a few years later that allowed me to run up a $180 Compuserve bill playing a primitive multiplayer game, the Amstrad PC5120 HD10 he got mostly to shut me up (and then monopolized it when I taught him how to track attendance at his high school on dBase III+) or the outrageously expensive laptop ($2,200!) he got me for graduating from college. Nor does it include my crazy Cajun neighbor's Heathkit H8 and string of Commodore Amigas (any one of which likely represents a pinnacle in computing for their time) that I played with any time said neighbor would let me.
What amazes me: The processor has gone from an 80386DX running at 33 MHz (which I bought specifically to avoid the crappy, hamstrung SX model) to a lower-tier Athlon X2 64 running at 2.4 GHz; the memory from 512 KB to 3 GB; the hard drive from 30 MB to 640 GB; the monitor from a CGA 13" CRT with 320 x 200 resolution to a 720p 20" LCD with 1280 x 720. (And the last computer isn't my biggest and best, even.) Oh, an the price has dropped 75 percent. It's like having learned to drive on a 1950 Ford Coupe (after playing with a Model A) then ending up in a Focus (with an older self-customized Mustang in the garage) two decades later—except it took Ford 80 years to make that leap and the price almost surely hasn't dropped to a quarter from the Model A.
(I only wish my programming prowess had kept up the pace, but I focused on getting good using applications from 1994 to 2007ish. I have a lot of catching up to do.)
As much of a pain in the ass and time suck as computers can be, to say nothing of the demands of periodic obsolescence, I feel blessed to have lived in these times. Moore's law has been one hell of a ride!
Pierce, you need to read "The Singularity is Near" by Ray Kurzweil. Need. To. Read. Now.
A computer, after three years, is about as serviceable as a 70-year old human. Hence, a six-year old computer is 140 years old in human years.