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altmorty OP t1_j9v1vzq wrote

Reply to comment by Mister_Jay_Peg in Almost 40% of domestic tasks could be done by robots ‘within decade’ by altmorty

Tech moves far more rapidly than it did back then.

>Shit, I grew up in the 80's and I can vividly remember seeing the price for a Macintosh in 1984 was $2500 not adjusted for inflation. That amounts to almost $7,200 today. The first computer in my house that my middle class parents could afford was the Tandy model in like 1988, and that was still like a grand at the time.

That's weird. There were plenty of way more affordable home computers back then. The ZX Spectrum was £125 (~$188) in 1982.

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sooprvylyn t1_j9vt96h wrote

The spectrum was barely more than a gaming system, and it was not particularly useful for business/home office related tasks. Home computers started to become a bit more popular in mid 80s, but they did cost like $2k+ in 80s dollars. When we got one around 87ish it was a big fucking deal. It had a monochrome screen, a dot matrix printer with punched paper feed, took massive floppies and didnt do shit other than some spreadsheets, word processing and was command prompt based.

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Mister_Jay_Peg t1_j9v2pqd wrote

Tech absolutely does move faster, but to assume that we have ever gone from "nothing" to "viable enough in the modern middle-class home that it fully replaces tasks" is not a 10-year mark. Never has been.

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