🚀 go-pugleaf

On 4/16/2018 1:42 PM, hanc...@bbs.cpcn.com wrote:
> On Sunday, April 15, 2018 at 9:24:47 PM UTC-4, Charles Richmond wrote:
> 
>>> The price was $90 in 1967 dollars.
>>> What is ironic is that I believe one can get a tax software
>>> package today for less than that, and the software will not
>>> only add up the taxes, but also figure them out.
> 
>> Yes, but...  even with the tax software, there is still the cost of the
>> computer...
> 
> Someone said the $90 in 1967 was roughly $600 today.  That is
> roughly what a computer costs today.
> 
> And while an adding machine would find multiple uses around
> the house, especially for balancing one's checkbook and a few
> other household chores (and sometimes for kids' homework*),
> a computer would also have plenty of uses around the home,
> such as email and word processing. 

But note that email probably incurs a monthly charge for Inet access. 
Maybe that can be rolled into the cost of your phone (which will 
probably be far higher than it was in 1967). Or the cost of cable TV 
(which will certainly be far higher than in 1967). I'll acknowledge 
that these days, the various softwares can be found for free (whether 
PD, free, open source, or pirated). For the WP, don't forget to add in 
the cost of a printer (though if the number of clogged ink cartridges 
I've seen is any indication, it's rarely used).

  If someone is a collector,
> the computer can be used to index the items within a collection,
> allowing sorting by different keywords (e.g. date, description,
> origin, etc.)
> 
 From the day's of the first HP(?) "home computer" long before PCs 
appeared, this has been one of the suggested uses. And I'm sure it 
would work fine for that. But in over 3 decades of providing support, 
I've yet to see anyone actually do it (for long, anyhow).

Now, I'm not arguing against the computer. I've got a bunch of them, 
and some are in daily use. While somewhere I have an adding machine, 
I'm not sure that it still works (I do know the Selectric stopped 
working).