In 1977, I made what felt like a monumental investment: $795 for a Commodore PET computer. But that was just the beginning. The need for storage led to another equally significant purchase – a disk drive system for another $795. That's a total of $1,590 in 1977, equivalent to approximately $7,950 in today's money. For context, that total investment would have bought you a decent used car back then. The PET was revolutionary for its time, featuring a built-in monitor, keyboard, and cassette deck in one integrated unit. It came with a whopping 4KB of RAM (yes, kilobytes), ran at a blazing 1 MHz, and with the disk drive, offered unprecedented storage capabilities for a personal computer.

Fast forward to 2025, and I find myself contemplating another significant investment in computing technology, this time for running the full DeepSeek-R1 AI model locally. The parallels in terms of technological ambition – and cost – are striking.