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July 19, 2010

#768: 1996

1996

[[A man is going through a cardboard box marked “MISC”, and finds a catalog. A woman looks on.]]

Man: 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”

Woman:

Nice!

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

Woman: 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!

Man: Oooh!

[[The man continues to read from his.]]

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

W display!

Woman: Times sure have… …have… uh.

[[They both put down their catalogs.]]

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

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

that

crappy.