We’ve come a long way, baby

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My husband and I visited his parents last weekend and ended up discovering a stack of old photography magazines his mom had saved. The following gem is an excerpt from the American Photo March/April 1996 issue and was written as a computer review for readers looking to “buy a new machine designed for the online age.” Enjoy:

We chose the [IBM] Aptiva M71 ($2,999 list) for our Net-crusing system because its 133-megahertz Pentium processor took us to warp speed. Then we paired it with IBM’s nearly glare-free 17-inch G70 monitor ($879), souped it up with an extra 16 megabytes (MB) of RAM ($600) for a total of 32 MB (expansion is possible up to 128 MB), and plugged in Storm Technology’s EasyPhoto Reader, an inexpensive ($249) and ingenious print scanner. Everything else we could dream up– a fast 28,800-baud modem, a quadruple speed CD-Rom drive, a huge 1.6-gigabyte hard drive, stereo speakers, a microphone, and dozens of software titles, and of course a keyboard and mouse– came with the Aptiva M71…

…When combined with IBM’s G70 monitor, the Aptiva (which comes loaded with Windows 95) displays 16.7 million colors at 640×480 pixel screen resolution. That’s a treat for visiting Websites and a necessity for accurate digital retouching of photographs. (If you want a higher 1024×768 resolution, you get a still-impressive 64,000 colors).

So in 1996 you could drop about $4,700 for the machine described above, which would take you to “warp speed” with its 28.8 modem.

Last month, I bought a Dell Inspiron laptop for $550. It came with a 160 gigabyte (that would be GB) hard drive, 2.0 gigahertz processor,1.0 GB of RAM, a 1280×800 resolution screen that displays 16.7 million colors, and an 8x DVD-RW drive.

I like the future.

3 thoughts on “We’ve come a long way, baby”

  2. Amy, Come back to this article in 10 years. Wonder how the Dell you just got compares to those in the future. This makes me wonder if I still have the receipt packed away from my computer in 1995. The thing I remember most is when I went to load the weather channel radar. I was able to prep dinner, eat, clean it up and the radar was still loading on my 9600 modem.