Forest Hill High School- Jackson, MS
Class Of 1988
1988 vs. 2008
Think the iPhone is pricey? The cool cell phone of 1988 cost $4,382 in today's dollars. A 150MB hard drive? $8,755. Take a trip with us down memory lane and you'll never whine about the price of a gadget again.
Ever wax nostalgic about your first PC or cell phone? It's easy to forgive your Tandy desktop or your Motorola portable for their limitations -- after all, they were technological infants.
What we often forget, though, is how $%#@! expensive that crude neolithic junk was! So join us on a trip two decades back in technology's history -- and we bet that the next time you're charged $895 for a small square of plastic and transistors, you'll smile and say, "Wow, what a bargain!"
- Price: $1,400 ($2,454 adjusted for inflation)
- CPU: Intel 80286
- RAM: 640KB
- Storage: 3.5-inch floppy
- Monitor: 14-inch, 640-by-200 RGB CRT, 16 colors
2008: HP Pavilion Elite m9100z series
- Price: about $1,000
- CPU: 2.8-GHz AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+ dual-core
- RAM: 2GB
- Storage: 750GB HD, CD/DVD recorder
- Monitor: 17-inch, 1440-by-900 LCD, 16.7 million colors
- Price: $4,098 ($7,182 adjusted for inflation)
- CPU: 4.77-/9.54-MHz Intel 80C86
- RAM: 1MB
- Storage: 20MB hard drive, 720KB floppy drive
- Display: 9.4-inch supertwist LCD
- Weight: 14 pounds (including modem, charger, and case)
- Battery life: 2 hours
2008:Lenovo ThinkPad X61
- Price: $1,724
- CPU: 2-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo T7300
- RAM: 2GB
- Storage: 160GB HD, PC Card slot, SD Card slot, external CD/DVD recorder
- Display: 12.1-inch 1024-by-768 LCD, 16.7 million colors
- Weight: 3.6 pounds (6.1 pounds including adapter, ultrabase, and DVD burner)
- Battery life: 6 hours
- Price: $995 ($1,744 adjusted for inflation)
- Printhead: 24-pin color dot-matrix
- Speed: 31 seconds/page in letter-quality mode, up to 10 minutes/page for color graphics
- Interface: Serial
- Price: $80
- Printhead: 4800-by-1200-dpi color, 1,600 nozzles
- Speed: as fast as 3.5 seconds/page in color
- Interface: USB 2.0 and PictBridge
- Price: $6.00 to $47.50 per hour ($11 to $83 adjusted for inflation)
- Connection: dial-up
- Speed: 300 to 9,600 baud
- Services: 400 databases, covering news, shopping, finance and the like; 140 discussion groups, e-mail
- Price: $35 per month
- Connection: Digital Subscriber Line
- Speed: 6 mbps
- Services: nearly anything you can imagine
- Price: $2,500 ($4,382 adjusted for inflation)
- Technology: analog
- Weight: 28 ounces
- Talk time: one hour
- Price: $399 (with two-year service agreement)
- Technology: EDGE/GSM quad-band
- Weight: 5 ounces
- Talk time: eight hours
- Price: $3,000 ($5,258 adjusted for inflation)
- Size: 35 inches
- Resolution: 480 lines, interlaced
- Format: NTSC
- Display technology: CRT
- Price: $2,300
- Size: 50 inches
- Resolution: 1080 lines, progressive scan
- Format: ATSC
- Display technology: plasma
- Price: $1,427 ($2,278 adjusted for inflation)
- Resolution: 420-line
- Output: composite
- Media supported: Laserdisc, CD-audio, CD-video
- Price: $500
- Resolution: 1080-line
- Output: HDMI
- Media supported: Blu-ray 1.1, DVD (with upscaling), CD
- Price: $350 ($613 adjusted for inflation)
- Format: CD-audio
- Capacity: 650MB or 70 minutes
- Batterylife: 4 hours
- Weight: 14 ounces
- Price: $299
- Formats: AAC/MP3/AIFF/WAV/ lossless audio
- Capacity: 8GB or 87 hours
- Batterylife: 22 hours of audio or 5 hours video
- Weight: 4.2 ounces
- Price: $200 ($351 adjusted for inflation)
- CPU: 1.79-MHz 8-bit
- RAM: 2KB
- Game format: cartridge
- Price: $399
- CPU: 3.2-GHz cell
- RAM: 256MB
- Game format: optical- and hard-disk-based games with Internet connectivity