Doug Kaye at IT Conversations told me that Halley Suitt’s interview with me on her "Memory Lane" program has had 2,500 listeners. One of them was Ken Corneliusen, a fellow alumus of electrical engineering school at Lehigh University. Ken liked the mention of Lego’s but corrected my comment in the interview that Legos were not around when I was growing up. He speaks with authority because spent parts of his childhood in Norway and remembers getting a small Lego set for Christmas sometime during 1953-1955. The Lego system was invented in Denmark and Ken lived on the southern tip of Norway where it was common "for people to take a ferry over to Denmark for a shopping trip". The Lego set he got was "plastic with red bricks, a few clear bricks and sloped half bricks that were used to make the roof of a small house".
Ken also could identify with the Radio Shack TRS-80 in the PC Innovation story earlier this month. Back in 1977 when I was buying the TRS-80, he was buying an 8K memory board kit for his Vector Graphics VG-1 computer. He paid $234 for it. Around the same time he also bought a Toyota for about $3,000. Based on current prices for computer memory, Ken calculated that if the price of the Toyota had dropped at the rate that memory prices have dropped, the Toyota would sell for $0.023 — two cents. I have not done the analysis, but without a calculator or spreadsheet we all know that the telephony costs have not followed the same trend — thanks to regulatory fees and taxes.
