I graduated on a Friday, and I was working at a company I had never even heard of on the next Wednesday. Most of the machines in that location at the time were 386sx processors with 40MB hard drives.  Our first upgrade was to a 33Mhz 386 with an 80MB drive.  These were running DOS 6 —  we had at the time Microsoft Windows 3.1 on one computer, but that was a surreptitious install put in by my predecessor, mostly for playing games.

My initial table is shown in Table 1.

Table 1

	1992	2002
Processor	33 Mhz 386	2.5 Ghz Pentium 4
Memory	4 Mb RAM	256 Mb RAM
Hard Drive	80 Mb	80 Gb
Modem	14.4	56 K
Internet Access
Browser
CD ROM
CD Writer
DVD
DVD Recorder
Digital Camera	Sort of	5 Megapixel

Average annual wages may have increased by about 25% over this time, from $30,000 per year to $40,000.  The price of lots of things like rent, medical care, and education have risen in tandem, leaving most people with somewhat more disposable income but no greater financial freedom.  However, nearly every college educated wage earner now has a computer at home, and another one at their desk.  What would it have cost in 1992 to get the technology one picks up routinely at their local computer retailer today?

One approach might be to pile as many ‘92 computers as it takes to get an ‘02 computer in terms of memory and clock speed; in the former that would be 2500/33 or 75 computers, the latter would be 256/4 or 64 computers, and on hard drives the ratio is 1000 to 1.  If a maxed out computer in ‘92 cost $4000, then this pile of equipment costs $303,000, before installation and support services.  First round goes to Meredith.

Another approach is to skip the technology and look at the total basket of costs for the average college educated consumer, including such prosaic things as cars, houses, and medical care.  Cars have really improved (getting a CD player in a ‘92 model year car would set you back $600, at least), and houses are larger, now averaging 2500 square feet new.  However, one could not imagine costs having dropped by 90% in any of these respects.  Second round goes to the competition.

The Internet was available to students at most of the larger colleges, but the Internet as a consumer service didn’t really appear until about 1995 (AOL didn’t count at that point).  The browser as we understand it was invented around 1993.  Certainly high-speed access required T1 lines, and these ran for tens of thousands a month.  Third round goes to Meredith.

People with real financial freedom consider mobility paramount, such as being able to load the family into the car and go to Disney World, or fly off to Paris with the spouse for champagne breakfast.  Disneyworld and hotels have been a bargain recently, although for a horrendously negative reason.  Flights to Paris are at all time lows, for the same reason.  Fourth round is a draw.

Making CDs and composing movies on one’s PC were out of the question in 1992; companies advertised small run CD production at $1 a copy in quantities of 1000.  DVDs didn’t exist.  Digital cameras cost $10,000 and up (they did exist, you could buy one if you were a radiologist).  Even single frame graphics composition was rough stuff with the memories, speeds, and software available at the time.  Realistically, your other hobby had to be fixing 1960's era British cars, it was just endless angst and frustration.  Fifth round goes to Meredith.

If someone’s average career lasts 40 years (from age 25 to age 65) then 25% of the workforce has turned over in that time.  So one out of every four of your associates will, on average, not remember CONFIG.SYS, EMM386, BUFFERS=, and some of the other monstrosities of the pre-Windows PC environment.  Our support problems are now in the region of spammers, hackers, and other rogue human elements, which are just as irritating but less likely to shut you down.  Sixth round is a draw.

So what do you think?  Was it fair? Was it relevant? Write me with your observations.  How could evaluating the outcome be anything less than totally subjective?