GoKawiilI've always had a fascination with simpler and low power computing. This lead me to run Photoshop on a 60 pence computer chip and it amazes me that this is possible.
Photo: A monochrome screen showing Adobe photoshop with a simple drawing running on an emulated Apple Macintosh
OK; this is hardly editing a full colour, highly detailed photograph but at least my "self portrait" will obviously set the illustration world on fire.
This was done by emulating an old Apple Mac on a Raspberry Pi RP2350 chip, which can be purchased for around 60p. Add the various extra parts needed and say roughly that a mid 1990s equivalent computer can be built today for a few pounds in one-off quantities. Call it the price of coffee and a cake in a European café today.
Adjusted for inflation, a roughly equivalent Macintosh SE to the one being emulated would cost £9554 today. (I found the pricing from a review in this 1989 Personal Computer World magazine online and used the Bank of England inflation calculator to convert the £3495 selling price.)
Whichever way you estimate: Computers are vastly cheaper nowadays and this computer is much cheaper than a modern PC.
The same emulated Mac can run other software - e.g. the WordPerfect word processor which was popular at the time. I found this surprisingly pleasant to type and concentrate with: It had an uncluttered interface and was distraction free when compared to my modern Macbook with its notifications and busy displays.
Photo: WordPerfect 1.0 on an emulated Apple Macintosh
Sometimes experimenting with things can spark my imagination and create new ideas. Simple and low power computers appeal to me, so it's interesting to ask "what is the minimal viable modern computer". A 60p chip is definitely not the cheapest possible, but it is certainly has an impressive "computing power to price" ratio.
Assume this is equivalent to a mid 1990s computer (it has two 150MHz processors, and easily adds 4Mb RAM and gigabytes of storage) . This was time when people made presentations, wrote documents, ran spreadsheets, sent emails and browsed (an admittedly simpler) web - not dissimilar to a lot of our computer use today.
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