So, when you spend $3,000 on computer gear today, you are in fact only spending half as much as was spent back in '79 for the Konan drive. . .you are really only spending $1,500 from 1979. . .due to changes in the value of the dollar as per an assortment of Consumer Price Index figures [none of which is in agreement with any of the others, so you are encouraged a bit to look up additional information on the subject. These figures [below] are presented only to provide a continuum to make comparisons. Actually these figures are a conservative estimate [as most government figures seem to be [example, no double digit inflation for any year since 1947, which was an extremely good year, by the way.]

So, while other prices were rising to make up for weakenings in the dollar. . .you are probably aware that your expenses, in general, have just about exactly doubled since 1979, when we bought that first hard drive for $3,000. Those $3,000 in a bank account that created no real profit other than enough interest to keep up with the Cost of Living increases, would now be $6,000 and would buy you a computer more powerful and with more RAM and hard drive space than most of you want. A Pentium with 8 megabytes of RAM and adding several gigabytes of hard drive, or a 486 with even more RAM and hard drive.

While the prices of everything else had been going up at 5%, 6%, 7%, 8%, 9% a year, the price of computers has gone down, at about 33% per year. . .a truly astonishing rate that lets you buy something hundreds of times better for less than the price was just 10 or 15 years ago.

Below you will find a short index of the computers we bought since 1979, and then a price index from 1875 to 2010 in case you want to look up some prices mentioned in certain years a decade or a century ago would actually be today.

For example, a teenager watching Roger Rabbit mentioned that the $100 Bob Hoskins received for working on the case was an extremely low figure. However, an examination of the figure below for 1947 will reveal that prices then were about 17.5% which would make Hoskins' fee about $600 in our 1993 dollars we use today. . .even if the physical dollars are the same.

So, what happens to the value that was lost from our dollars that do not buy as much by a factor of 17.5% since 1947 ?

Let's imagine for a moment that we are financial wizards and have all the financial connections open to such wizards; the early 1970's are a perfect example: Nixon is in office, and he releases the dollar from the $35 per ounce price supports the dollar has had since Roosevelt took us off the standards of direct gold exchange to end the Depression in the 1930's.

As an example, we send a million of our dollars to somewhere we CAN buy gold [it was illegal then for US citizens to have gold, unless they were coin collectors or worked gold in the professions, such as dentistry, jewelry, etc.]

So, we have bought a million dollars worth of gold at around $35 per ounce, which was a pretty fixed price at the time.

Now, the price restrictions of $35 per ounce are removed and the price of gold goes up to $755 per ounce, just about what it did during the next few months after the price release.