Each generation of hardware is sure that it was he who received the most shameless price tags. RTX 5090 for an amount comparable to a used car, memory that has doubled in price in a year, a 2 TB SSD for the price of a mid-range video card – it seems that this has never happened before.
It was worse before, my memory is just selective.
The reason to remember this was a Dell newspaper advertisement from 1996, where the flagship Dimension XPS Pro200n workstation was offered for $5,799 or leased for $170 per month. Adjusted for inflation, that’s almost $12,000.
For this money the buyer received:
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Intel Pentium Pro processor at 200 MHz
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32 MB EDO RAM, expandable up to 128 MB
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3.2 GB hard drive
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20″ Trinitron CRT monitor
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Imagine 128 Series 2 video card with 4 MB of video memory
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8x CD-ROM drive and Windows NT 4.0
An important detail that is usually lost behind the fancy numbers: this is not a gaming PC. The Pentium Pro came out in late 1995 as a server and work chip with L2 cache right in the processor package, which made production expensive and unsuitable for the mass market.
Wheel of Samsara for PC gamers – new technologies slow down old powerful video cards
On 32-bit code it tore up a regular Pentium, but on 16-bit programs of the Windows 3.11 era it worked worse in places, which is why it behaved like a fast 486 in games of that time.
Number Nine’s Imagine 128 Series 2 also had nothing to do with entertainment – it was a professional 2D card, the ideological ancestor of what Nvidia would later call Quadro. Trinitron itself in this configuration, according to the estimates of knowledgeable people, was worth a couple of thousand dollars out of the total amount.
Then arithmetic begins, which makes you feel uneasy. Pentium Pro produced about 0.2 GFLOPS, a modern smartphone chip – thousands, that is, the gap is measured in millions of percent. Someone compared it to walking to the store against the speed of the Voyager probes, someone remembered the classic fact about the computing power of the iPhone and the entire Apollo program, and one said directly:
Performance is lower than that of the 2026 pregnancy test.
In thirty years, someone will still be scrolling through an advertisement with 32 GB of RAM and will sincerely not understand how they even worked on it.
