The same people who used an IBM 029 cardpunch. Back then, timesharing was rather expensive and could drain your computer account funds fast. Sixty cents to run a job on the 360, and $24/hour to run timeshare.
How about a CoCo? :)
i'm in the computer biz.. and early in my career i "had to have" the latest stuff. finally.. when I started having other hobbies ;-) i had to decide if having the latest/greatest was worth the premium
my home machine is a p166 (166 not 1.66!), but it's moslty used by my wife for browsing/email.
i have a work laptop that is a 500Mhz.. and does an OK job for the kinds of apps I run
It comes down to what do you need it for. My 166 is very adequate for browsing/email. My 500 (w/ 256MB ram) is most adequate for running Office 97, a slew of computer admin type apps, and some app development tools.
I would suggest going with 12mo old or older technology and getting the big price breaks. If you really need a newer machine, IMO, you get a better benefit/cost ratio by looking at the price curve of older to newer systems and buying the one just ahead of the rapid increase. cpu costs will generally drive the overall costs. I'd guess right now, a 1.8-2.2 Ghz would be a good deal. Greater than that and you pay a premium. (Do the comparison yourself, I've not done it lately). Once you have that machine, try to get 2+ years (as long as it does what you want) out of it. I think you are better off.. buying a "middle of the road machine" and getting 2-3 years, then buying the top end and getting 3-4 years. You save 500-1000 and probably will find out you did not need it anyway.
There are exceptions.. you are into high-end graphics; you use you computer to generate income and time saved = more revenue; etc.
I upgrade whenever I feel that I need to. I just completely upgraded all the computers in the house within the past month because my old motherboard developed a habit of blowing DIMMs. Every DIMM that got dropped into the system stopped working so I replaced my board/CPU, upgraded the memory, and while I was at it, replaced my wife's board/CPU/memory since I had blown most of it while testing anyhow.
I rarely replace an entire computer, I build all of my own and the case/PS on both computers is still fine, as are the drives/CDs, etc. Probably the next thing on the agenda is to get 200gb drives for both computers.
How many people would remember 300baud? How many people would remember BBSes? How many people would remember Bill Gates saying "640k should be enough for anyone"?
Um... I do! ;)
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