My girlfriend is the most archived person I know. She has tons of space devoted to her life. Fortunately I worship her like the goddess she is so I don't mind. Really though, sometimes I think she goes a bit too far in what she keeps. On the other hand, she knows where these items came from and most likely she can tell you who she was talking to and what she ate that day. I don't have a quarter of the stuff she has but if it is older than three days old I don't know where it comes from. Fortunately for me, my girlfriend does.
Old Macintosh Pricelist 00
All joking aside, she has a phenomenal memory and her level of recall of what happens around her is incredible. She is a multi-sensory information vacuum, with built-in indexing and categorization. Like a vacuum-cleaner she also catches junk that carries a big "Huh" factor. In this case it is three pages of Apple Equipment prices. It is a good price list. Monitors, laptops, desktops, and hardware to go with it. Right now, I am eyeing a sweet "Power Book 500 Series". I think the 540C model with the 12MB of RAM and 320MB of hard-drive sounds about right. Add on the "active matrix color LCD" and it is only 4691.52 USD. What a steal!
Old Macintosh Pricelist 01
It is pretty cool to see this reminder of computer prices of the past. Our family got our first computer in 1988. It was a 4.77 MHz IBM XT knockoff. We had a "four" color screen, no hard drive, and DOS 3. It was great. Sometime in 1993 or 1994 we upgraded to a computer that had a VGA monitor, a 486 DX2 processor, and a Tseng graphics card with 1MB of VRAM if I remember correctly. I am pretty sure our computers were some sort of East Asian knock-off. These weren't high-quality machines but my parents got us these computers as investments.
Old Macintosh Pricelist 02
I think my parents knew that the future was going to make use of computers. I won't pretend that they knew what was coming but they knew enough to give their children the tools to get a handle on the future. They made sure we'd have the tools to be literate so that we wouldn't be held back. When I see people my age in the USA who can't interact with a computer, I thank my parents.
My parents had just moved to Palestine with us in tow, they were up to their eyeballs in debt, and the economy was tanking. Even so they took on the financial burden and bought this equipment which could easily be described as a frivolous luxury. A luxury we didn't even use to the best of our abilities. Looking at these price sheets from 1995 reminds me of the financial sacrifice my parents took and I am thankful to them for giving me the tools to make me literate in a computer-centric work.
