Atari to XBox
Get two Xbox Xs for the time price of one Atari 2600
The Atari 2600 was introduced in 1977. It was priced at $199. Unskilled wages at the time were $3.15 an hour, so the time price was around 63 hours. Today you can pick up a Xbox X for $499. With unskilled wages today around $16.50, the time price just over 30 hours. You get two xBox Xs today for the time price of one Atari 2600 in 1977.
The Atari had a chip running at 1.19 Megahertz, or 1,190,000 cycles per second and had 128 bytes or RAM. The maximum resolution was 160 x 192 with 128 colors.
The Xbox X graphics chip runs at 12 teraflops, or 12 trillion per second. It has 16GB of memory and 1 TB of storage and can display billions of colors on a 8K display.
The Xbox can display 1,080 times more pixels in millions of more colors, 10 million times faster, with 125 million times more memory. In the last 46 years computer creativity has gone exponentially abundant. Just as Gordon Moore and George Gilder predicted.
Special note: College dropout Steve Jobs was employee #40 at Atari in 1974. He had his friend Steve Wozniak build the game Breakout for Atari. Later Jobs got Atari to help pay for his trip to India.
We describe the process of transforming scarcities into abundances in our new book, Superabundance, available at Amazon. Jordan Peterson calls it a “profoundly optimistic book.” There has never been a better time to create more life.
Gale Pooley is a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute and a board member at Human Progress.
Progress in computation is almost incomprehensible. So fast, in fact, that while I can play a Sega Genysis or Playstation, my skills were behind by the time the Xbox and PS2 came out.
I’ll leave gaming to the young.