How times change
I lost all of my hard disk data due to a power surge in December. On Wednesday the data recovery man who had supposedly been working on my disks for over 3 months informed me that he had given up. He has returned the disks and now I am back to square one. Mostly. I have from time-to-time made backups of my data and so have recovered all of my documents pre-July 1998 and ~1500 of my photos from 2001-2003. As I restore data I have been going down memory lane and looking at some of my past work. Here is a gem, my fantasy computer wish list from 27 January 1996:
| Description | Price | Tax | Price | Essential |
| Pentium 133 | 1645 | 22 | 2007 | * |
| 1080Mb IDE HDD | 315 | 22 | 384 | * |
| 1080Mb IDE HDD | 315 | 22 | 384 | |
| 32Mb RAM | 1020 | 22 | 1244 | * |
| 64-bit VGA card w/MPEG | 39 | 22 | 47 | * |
| Upgrade to 2Mb Video | 60 | 22 | 73 | * |
| Philips 17” MM Monitor 1280×1024 | 1200 | 22 | 1464 | * |
| Sound Card, 4xCD-ROM, 18 CDs | 315 | 13.2 | 357 | * |
| Upgrade Sound Card to 32bit PnP | 70 | 11 | 77 | * |
| MS Office Pro 4.3 CD-ROM (OEM) | 65 | 0 | 65 | * |
| Adobe Photoshop 3.0 NFR CD | 172 | 0 | 172 | * |
| Adobe PageMaker 5.0 NFR CD | 161 | 0 | 161 | |
| 5377 | 6435 | 5890 |
Check out that price!!