# Previously expensive high tech that's cheap now **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [February 26, 2003, 12:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/previously-expensive-high-tech-thats-cheap-now/157514 "2003-02-26T00:05:41Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![David\_Simmons](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/9de053/32.png) [@David\_Simmons](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/David_Simmons)\ **Post date:** [February 27, 2003, 7:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/previously-expensive-high-tech-thats-cheap-now/157514/41 "2003-02-27T19:01:54Z")
Ball-point pens aren’t exactly hi tech, but … During the early days of WWII I read an article in _Readers’ Digest_ (it was a better mag then) about the revolutionary things that were in hand but were being blocked because of wartime material restrictions. One of them was a pen that used a little ball rolling ink onto the paper. After the war was over I was in Belgium reading the _Sunday New York Times_ that the parents of a friend of mine sent him. In it was a full-page ad for a revolutionary ball-point pen, the latest post war whizbang, from the Reynolds Pan company. The cost was a mere $12.50. I won’t bother to figure inflation exactly but I’ll bet that translates to over $50.00 now. Anyway, this friend and I both ordered one and they arrived in due course. They were terrible, skipped, leaked and on and on. On the trip home on the good old transport, _Haverford Victory_, I read on the bulletin board that at noon the next day we would be 5 miles, straight down, from land. So at noon the next day I stepped to the rail and dropped my Reynolds ball-point into one of the deepest places in the Atlantic Ocean. Within just a short time you could get ball-points for a buck and the price went down from there. ---
**Author:** ![ftg](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ftg/32/2801_2.png) [@ftg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ftg)\ **Post date:** [February 27, 2003, 7:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/previously-expensive-high-tech-thats-cheap-now/157514/42 "2003-02-27T19:05:57Z")
To the people who think RAM used to be really expensive. Phffft. I remember 8K of real core memory being $200,000. As for stuff that isn’t tech related that has come down in price. A lot of stuff is cheaper to make via tech. A typical car nowadays is cheaper than 40 years ago, accounting for inflation and trying to be reasonable about features. But general not as dramatic as tech stuff. CDs cost virtually nothing to make, compared to vinyl or tape. ---
**Author:** ![flapcats](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/7993a0/32.png) [@flapcats](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/flapcats)\ **Post date:** [February 27, 2003, 11:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/previously-expensive-high-tech-thats-cheap-now/157514/43 "2003-02-27T23:12:38Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Gary Kumquat \* > \*\*To reverse the question, can anyone think of any previously high tech item that hasn’t dropped dramatically in price? \*\* Space Stations? LCD projectors are pretty expensive. Decent webcams seem to have gone UP in price recently (ignoring those £40 320x ones) - due to the boredbanned uptake I guess). RAM goes up and down constantly and you I always run out so it’s not really an advance - the numbers have changed but computers are still slow. I hit the 1.8gb mark in my commit charge (out of 1gb of real RAM) at work today. It may be dirt cheap, but what you bought then was top-of-the-range and todays top-of-the-range will still set you back about the same. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2003, 1:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/previously-expensive-high-tech-thats-cheap-now/157514/44 "2003-02-28T01:43:34Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by voguevixen \* > \*\*Yeah, and you had to buy (or rent!!!) them from the phone company (what a racket, eh?) Now you can get a phone dang near anyplace, and have a billion styles to choose from. \*\* Buy? Never! You only rented those phones. They were pretty expensive to make also, since they were supposed to last forever. That was why they never introduced anything new - the customers could turn in their old phones for new ones for free. Just after divestiture, I went to a technical presentation on how to take quality out of phones. It made no sense to design them to last for decades when people actually bought them. - former telephone person ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2003, 1:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/previously-expensive-high-tech-thats-cheap-now/157514/45 "2003-02-28T01:47:47Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Grelby \* > \*\*CD-ROM drives. You don’t even really think about it anymore, because they’ve been standard equipment for at least the last six years or so. However, they are now beginning to be superceded by the DVD-ROM drive, which I expect will be standard in no more than two years. DVDs replacing CDs will take longer. In any case, a decent CD-ROM drive can be had for about $15. By decent, I mean around 50X. That’s a big change from how much a double speed external CD-ROM drive went for in 1994. \*\* I just got a 56X one for $29 to replace the one in my old PC that finally died. (Fry’s didn’t have them for $15.) We have 2 CD burners already, so I didn’t want to pay any extra for one. The other thing - I was brought up to wear a static strap whenever I touched the insides of a PC. No need to anymore - slide the old drive out, unplug it, plug the new drive in, and tighten the screws. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2003, 1:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/previously-expensive-high-tech-thats-cheap-now/157514/46 "2003-02-28T01:52:11Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by ftg \* > \*\*To the people who think RAM used to be really expensive. Phffft. I remember 8K of real core memory being $200,000. \*\* My senior year in college I listened to a lecture by a professor bravely predicting that someday memory would come down to a penny a bit. In grad school I used a washing machine size disk drive, with my own disk I swapped in when I used the PDP-11. At a recent meeting all the presentations were recorded on a memory about the size of a keychain that plugged into the port of your laptop. I don’t know how much that is, but cheaper than an old hard-drive - and it fits in your pocket. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/previously-expensive-high-tech-thats-cheap-now/157514.md?page=2)