I bought a fairly decent telly earlier in the year, a Philips smart one with Ambilight (which is turned off!) for £299. Admittedly it was about 50% off in a sale BUT...
I was just sorting out some old papers and found a receipt for the first colour telly I bought (a Hitachi 226 22" jobby), which came with a free portable B&W telly (which we used in the caravan as it was 12v as well as 240v). That was in 1982 and it cost me £339. We'd rented up till then, which I believe was fairly common.
I also had one of the first VHS recorders in the country which had a proper wireless remote control, unlike many, which were wired. That machine, probably around the same time as the telly, cost us £650. We were discussing today how revolutionary VCRs were - it was the first time you could record something and scoot through the ads, or watch it again when you wanted to , rather than having to wait for a repeat.
I also reckon washing machines and fridges haven't changed much in actual ££s since that time, despite advances in technology - WiFi connected dishwasher anyone? (Mine is!)
Yet I can remember when my employer Wang started making IBM compatible PCs there was quite a good staff discount, and I'm pretty sure a colleague paid over £3000 for one, with Winchester hard drive (and pre- Windows I suspect). You'd be hard pushed to spend that much today.
|
1972
Colour TV 22" £210 - my take home pay was £96
Fridge £80
Cooker £150
Washing machine twin tub £130
G-plan sideboard, table & 6 chairs £235
MGB GT New £1250
How do I know this - we discovered a file with all the receipts a few years back
|
Colour TV's have always been £300, so have fallen dramatically in real cost over 50 years.
Why didn't that work for cars?
I do recall our first autowasher costing £220 from Asda in 1980. Phillips. Lasted a long long time too.
Last edited by: Manatee on Wed 14 Dec 22 at 17:46
|
|
Ah yes, the G Plan - B-i-L gave us £500 wedding pressie in 1976. It bought us a decent three piece suite, a G plan table & 6 chairs and sideboard - all the G Plan is still in use today and not really showing its age (though the chairs were recovered some years back).
|
According to Bargain Hunt (BBC1) and the like Gplan is now part of the furniture called “mid-century” and is collectible. Having said that it’s still not worth anything like it cost new in real terms.
As a fellow mid-century product I always quite liked it but never bought any.
|
>> According to Bargain Hunt (BBC1) and the like Gplan is now part of the furniture
>> called “mid-century” and is collectible.
But not the mid century radiogram........
|
|
Camcorder in the early 90s £800, phone does a better job now.
|
In 1972, 50 years ago, the average wage was £1170pa. I started as a lowly articled clerk in 1974 at £1000 pa. The average wage is now ~£30,000pa.
The TV, VHS, etc that you may have paid £200 for in 1980 would now cost ~£2500 had prices kept pace with wages.
The Ford Cortina you always promised yourself would have cost ~£1200 in 1972 - about equivalent to a years pay and not much different to a mid range (better equipped and performance) hatch today.
The flat I purchased in N London for £13k would now cost ~£270k.
Smart phones, internet, Amazon, Google etc were the stuff of science fiction.
|
>Smart phones, internet, Amazon, Google etc were the stuff of science fiction.
Errr. The origins of the internet date back to the 60s.
|
>> >Smart phones, internet, Amazon, Google etc were the stuff of science fiction.
>>
>> Errr. The origins of the internet date back to the 60s.
>>
Well yes, packet switching, routing etc, but I don't think many people envisaged the sort of computing power that we carry around in our pockets nowadays and the shear volume of things available on line - from near instant look up of data (car mots etc, company information) to the latest movies on demand and downloadable in an instant and diagnosis tools all built in to smart watches.
Except that is for Arthur C Clarke. There is a video that I saw recently but can't find now, where he talks about a surgeon in Edinburgh being able to undertake an operation on the other side of the world remotely and that is effectively what the da-Vinci medical robot enables.
|
|
You never saw the Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet documentaries?
|
|
I'm still waiting for the beam me up scotty app.
|
Google, and most of the rest of the world generally accepts the first email was sent in 1971.
JANET - Joint Academic Network - was the first "internet" developed from the 1970s.
By 1990 many had a domestic dial up connection at around 56kbs. Downloading a single page could take minutes if network demands were high.
The first iPhone was launched in 2007 - this is around the date when the smartphone came of age.
This would seem laughably slow and limited today - my grand-daughter age 9 would treat it with contempt and wonder what all the excitement was for.
Suggesting the internet has been around for 50 years is like asserting the EV has been around for ~175 years. Absolutely correct, but completely irrelevant.
|
>Google, and most of the rest of the world generally accepts the first email was sent in 1971.
Email is not the internet. It is simply an application that now uses the internet as the most convenient communication mechanism to transfer data - just like a web browser or video app. Early Unix systems used UUCP over serial lines to transfer messages and files.
>JANET - Joint Academic Network - was the first "internet" developed from the 1970s.
Twaddle.
JANET as a workable network did not appear until around 1980 or so when they began dabbling with X.25 and until that point it was just a mish mash of seperate proprietary machines connected by wet string. It didn't even adopt TCP/IP until the 90s.
The immediate predecessor to the internet was ARPANET, and one of the first non-research TCP/IP connections in the UK from ARPANET was located in a windowless portacabin on a Royal Signals site in the West Midlands in 1985 IIRC. The machine was a Pyramid Technology 90x supermini and the TCP/IP source code had to be ported and compiled into the kernel onsite. I know because I installed it.
>By 1990 many had a domestic dial up connection at around 56kbs. Downloading
>a single page could take minutes if network demands were high.
There was no such beast as a 56kbps dialup modem in 1990 so downloading a single page would actually take quite a few years.
>Suggesting the internet has been around for 50 years is like asserting the EV has been around for ~175 years.
>Absolutely correct, but completely irrelevant.
If the history and basic designs adopted at the birth of the internet are irrelevant perhaps you could enlighten the IETF with your proposals for expanding the internet address space without breaking every existing internet-capable device?
Don't forget to open an RFC.
|
>>There was no such beast as a 56kbps dialup modem in 1990 so downloading a single page would actually take quite a few years.
Wish I could remember all that, if I ever knew it.
About 1989/90 I think I started an OUBS course that included computer conferencing. I bought a modem in a computer auction, it was BT branded, in a metal case you could stand on, and was about 2kbps IIRC (it was 2 of whatever it was anyway).
It felt like communicating with Mars. Text arrived one letter at a time like a teleprinter. Green on a black screen, none of your WYSIYG of course. Very exciting. I and my fellow students would chat (slowly) about the assignments.
ISTR the actual internet arriving on a single suitably equipped PC at work (I was working for a now defunct electrical retailer at the time) in about 1995. Nobody seemed to know what to do with it except search for porn which was rapidly prohibited by management. One found things using AltaVista.
Last edited by: Manatee on Thu 15 Dec 22 at 19:18
|
>> Well yes, packet switching, routing etc, but I don't think many people envisaged the sort
>> of computing power that we carry around in our pockets nowadays
And strangely your pocket device now only needs to be relatively dumb. All of that was envisaged and planned for by my ex employer 40 years ago Thin clients it was called. The only fundamental failure of that plan was a:internet to the door wasnt available b:there no was internet to your pocket.
a: and b: came about 20 years too late.
|
Decades ago we used to fly to the Alps in summer for 2 weeks backpacking.
LBA > AMS > Geneva. Cost an absolute fortune, and a few times our camping gear didn’t make the connection, so an enforced overnight in Geneva.
Cheap as chips now, apart from winter weekends during the ski season.
Friends booked RYR LBA - ALC return last week . Outbound a few days before Christmas, returning just before New Year.
£19.95 each way...hand luggage only..still sub £100 return with a 10kg bag which they didn’t need
|
The value of stuff - Falkirk Bairn
