Box Elder High School

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!" Home Desktop PCs  1988: Tandy 1000 TL 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   Laptop PCs 1988:Toshiba T1200H 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   Color Printers 1988: AlpsALQ300 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 2008: Canon Pixma iP3500 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   Internet Access 1988: CompuServe 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 2008: AT&T Elite DSL Price: $35 per month Connection: Digital Subscriber Line Speed: 6 mbps Services: nearly anything you can imagine   Cell Phones 1988: Motorola DynaTAC 8500XL Price: $2,500 ($4,382 adjusted for inflation) Technology: analog Weight: 28 ounces Talk time: one hour 2008: Apple iPhone Price: $399 (with two-year service agreement) Technology: EDGE/GSM quad-band Weight: 5 ounces Talk time: eight hours   Big-Screen TVs 1988: Mitsubishi Diamond Vision II 3503 Price: $3,000 ($5,258 adjusted for inflation) Size: 35 inches Resolution: 480 lines, interlaced Format: NTSC Display technology: CRT 2008: Panasonic TH-50PZ77U HDTV Price: $2,300 Size: 50 inches Resolution: 1080 lines, progressive scan Format: ATSC Display technology: plasma   Video Players 1988: Pioneer CLD-1010 Laserdisc Player Price: $1,427 ($2,278 adjusted for inflation) Resolution: 420-line Output: composite Media supported: Laserdisc, CD-audio, CD-video 2008: Panasonic DMP-BD30K Blu-ray Disc Player Price: $500 Resolution: 1080-line Output: HDMI Media supported: Blu-ray 1.1, DVD (with upscaling), CD   Portable Audio Players 1988: Sony Discman D-10 Price: $350 ($613 adjusted for inflation) Format: CD-audio Capacity: 650MB or 70 minutes Batterylife: 4 hours Weight: 14 ounces   2008: Apple iPod Touch 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   Game Consoles 1988: Nintendo NES Price: $200 ($351 adjusted for inflation) CPU: 1.79-MHz 8-bit RAM: 2KB Game format: cartridge 2008: Sony PlayStation 3 40GB Price: $399 CPU: 3.2-GHz cell RAM: 256MB Game format: optical- and hard-disk-based games with Internet connectivity