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https://kottke.org/10/05/report-on-online-newspapers-circa-1981
Honestly kind of fascinating. Story from 1981 discussing an experiment where newspapers were publishing on an early version of the internet. Estimated that 2,000 people in the Bay Area had home computers at the time, of which about 500 signed up to receive the paper. It would take an hour to download the newspaper, and the cost was 5 dollars an hour to use the internet, which my handy AI says is about 19 dollars an hour on 2024 money.
Meanwhile I see this image on a federated social network on my phone, use Google to circle to search to find the above link and watch the newscast from 1980, then pop over to one of 4 AI apps I have on my phone to convert the currency, and make this comment, all while I poop. Amazing how far we come.
Why would you ever use AI to do that? Plugging it into an actual inflation calculator gives $18.12, which took like 5 seconds to do.
https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=5&year1=198101&year2=202409