#768: 1996 explain

[Cueball is going through a cardboard box marked “MISC”, and finds a catalog. Megan looks on.]

Cueball: Check it out - old Computer Shoppers! Wow - in 1996, $3,000 would get you a 100 MHz Pentium system with a parallel port, two serial ports, a 2MB video card, and “MS-Windows”

Megan: Nice!

[The two are face-to-face, and they each have a separate copy of Computer Shopper.]

Megan: And $299 would get you a Palm Pilot 100- - 16MHz, 128Kb storage, and a memo pad, calendar, and state-of-the-art address book that can store over 100 names!

Cueball: Oooh!

[Cueball continues to read from his.]

Cueball: And $110 would get you a bulky TI graphing calculator with around 10MHz CPU, 24Kb RAM, and a 96x64-pixel B/W display!

Megan: Times sure have… …have… uh.

[They both put down their catalogs.]

Cueball: Okay, what the hell, T.I.?

Megan: Maybe they cost so much now because there’s only one engineer left who remembers how to make displays that crappy.