What could your money really buy?
A dollar in 1990 isn't a dollar today. Step into the time machine and see exactly what inflation has done to purchasing power across the decades.
"Inflation is taxation without legislation."
— Milton Friedman
We all feel inflation — at the grocery store, at the gas pump, in rent checks that climb year after year. But the human brain is terrible at intuiting compound change over time. We remember that a candy bar used to cost a quarter, but we can't quite articulate what that means in the context of wages, housing, and the cost of simply existing.
Inflation Time Machine makes the invisible visible.
This is an interactive web experience that lets you travel through time and witness how the purchasing power of the US dollar has shifted across decades. Select a year, enter an amount, and watch history unfold — not as dry statistics, but as a tangible, visceral comparison of what your money could and can no longer buy.
The goal is simple: make economic data feel personal.
This project is intentionally minimal. No frameworks. No bundlers. No build steps. Just the fundamentals, done well.
| Layer | Technology |
|---|---|
| Structure | Semantic HTML5 |
| Styling | Vanilla CSS3 |
| Logic | Plain JavaScript |
| Deployment | GitHub Pages via GitHub Actions |
Why? Because clarity beats complexity. Every line of code in this project is readable by anyone who has spent a week learning web development. That's a feature, not a limitation.
inflationtimemachine/
├── index.html # Home — the main experience
├── subpage1.html # Additional exploration page
├── css/ # Stylesheets
├── js/ # Application logic & data
├── images/ # Visual assets
└── .github/workflows/ # Automated deployment pipeline
Visit the deployed site: inflationtimemachine.xyz
Pick your flavor:
Local server (recommended)
Using Python (already on most machines):
python3 -m http.server 8000Using VS Code: Install the Live Server extension → right-click index.html → Open with Live Server.
Then navigate to http://localhost:8000 (or the port shown) and you're time-traveling.
This project is a collaborative effort built for WDD 231 — Web Frontend Development at Brigham Young University–Idaho.
| Contributor | Role |
|---|---|
| Dalin Stone | Backend & Data |
| Joshua Rushton | Design & Content |
There's a school of thought that says every web project needs a framework, a transpiler, a package manager, and 400MB of node_modules. We respectfully disagree.
This project proves that HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are still a complete technology stack. The browser is the runtime. GitHub Actions is the deployment pipeline. The rest is craft.
This project is an academic work created for educational purposes at BYU-Idaho.