My first computer was purchased in 1995 for about 800 dollars, and had a 200mb hard drive. The middle-of-the-line ipod touch 2nd gen today costs 300 dollars, and has a 16gb hard drive, making it about 80 times better than my first computer. I can’t find specs for processing or video output power for the iPod touch, but I’m estimating they’re at least 10, and possibly up to 20 times better than my first computer. The device is about 30 times smaller than all the internal components of my first computer, and probably 200 times smaller if you include the peripherals like keyboard and speakers and power/input cords, but don’t include the case or monitor. If you compare size multiplied by power, my new iPod is 80x200 = 16,000 times better than my first computer from less than 15 years ago, and cost less than half the price, which is probably closer to 1/3 of the price after factoring in inflation.
So how does your first computer hold up to the 2nd generation iPod touch?
My first computer was a Mac Plus. I remember buying Ultima III for that thing and thinking that it was the coolest game on the face of the earth. Now, a practically infinite number of games several orders of magnitude cooler than Ultima can be had for free on an iPod Touch.
Pah! The first computer we had had home (until my dad sent it back) was a Sinclair ZX80 which had 1kb of RAM. It couldn’t do decimals, so 10/3=3. Off the top of my head, I don’t remember how many MP3s it could hold.
My first computer was a Timex/Sinclair 1000. I had the awesome upgrade of 16K. Of course, if you moved just right, the extra memory would fall off and crash the computer.
After running for a while, the keyboard was quite toasty. I bet no iPod has a hand-warming feature.
Forget comparing the T/S to an iPod. My wristwatch has more computing power than my old computer. My car’s onboard computer has more power. Still, I whiled away many hours with the ol’ T/S. (Lots of those hours were spent waiting for software to load from the tape recorder!)
I don’t even remember the specs of my Apple II, but my first Mac (Classic) had no hard drive, and could only take 800K floppies. Later, I upgraded to a 40MB HD. I remember being impressed that Zip disks could hold twice that and then some.
I now have a 30GB iPod and the G1, which accepts 16GB miniSDs.
I had to duct tape my memory module (it was so big, a better name might be “brick”) to the back of my T/S1000, and even then, I had to be careful… especially given the way you had to type on that damn membrane keyboard (I had to “press and roll” my finger on each key).
Depends on the bit rate, among other things. But an average 3 1/2 minute MP3 on my computer encoded at 192 kbps takes up 4931 KB of memory. So your PC would have held 1/4931 of an MP3. Or 0.0002. Or 1/25 second of music.
I had played with other computers, but the first one I ever owned was an Amiga 1000. And, honestly, the Amiga has it all over my iPod Touch in some ways. There are entire classes of software that have never appeared on the iPod Touch - or on Windows or Mac for that matter. If I could find a genlock for my iPod Touch so I could overlay it’s graphics on live video, or a digitizer so I could sample and process video…
But on the other hand, the Touch fits in my pocket.
My first computer was a low end Tandy that I bought because my kid’s school had logo, but there was a long wait for a little time on the computer. This thing could run logo. It had to be upgraded before it could do square roots, though.
I forget if it was this machine or an early game machine that gave the boys serious giggles one day. Whichever it was, you gave it instructions and if you didn’t give it a recognizable one, it printed out: “I don’t know how to _______.”
One of them got frustrated after repeated tries and typed in a bad word. They were entranced with the result and sat around giggling and thinking of more things that the machine could say it didn’t know how to do.
My dad did that on our VIC-20 when I was a kid. That’s also how we got our first word processing program, Speedscript. It didn’t even have automatic line wrapping, if I remember correctly. Which was kind of an issue when you were trying to figure out how many words fit into an 80-column line on the printer using a 22-column screen.
Today Cornetto is giving away cheap MP3 players in ice cream cones. I could literally go to the store today, buy an ice cream cone, get an MP3 player with orders of magnitude more power than that VIC-20, for free…and my reaction would probably be “I just got cheated out of a bite of ice cream”.