Technology

So everything is about right. Today you can buy a budget pc, and skim on performance, but back then (and I was there man!) you could not.

In 1985 HDD were only starting to gain traction for PC's and that was about the only thing you could spec up. That IBM pc is "High Res" which probably means it was VGA multicolour (yay!lol) with 640x480 resolution. So you were basically buying top of the line.

Today, if you were to build a top of the line PC, RTX4090, latest best intel cpu, PSU, etc, etc it would be easy to spend $5K!

But damn, the difference in performance from back then to now!! (That IBM is an XT which means it was a 4.77Mhz with 8086 cpu. Just looking at that picture, I can feel the weight of the bloody thing)

Well, actually this went from funny to tragic.

The company was called Need to Know, and it was initially in an old Victorian under a freeway overpass in San Francisco.

So I got the computer Friday and ran into this 23 line fail that evening. I called around 8:00 pm, expecting to get an answering machine. Instead I got, " Hey come on over!"

So I drive back to SF and get there around 9:00 pm. Somebody immediately puts a drink in my hand. People are just partying in a low key way. There are computer parts all over the place, but people are just partying.

So one of the guys took my machine apart, diagnosed the CPU failure, and replaced it with parts on hand.

I'm back in Berkeley by maybe 11:00 pm with a fully functional computer.

Here's where it gets ugly. I did business with them into the late 1980s. During that time , some psycho took on a grudge against them and literally burned their place of business down.

Several places of businesses, burned down sequentially. Fucking tragic.

I lost track of them by 1990. I don't know if they went further underground or what.

But they gave me a really human intro to computing. I can only hope they are well , wherever they are.

This is why the ZX Spectrum was so important, in 1982 it cost £125 for the 16K model (£469 or so now). That's within the reach of many consumers. Sure, it was laughably simplistic even at launch, but if it wasn't for the Speccy I wouldn't be an IT professional today.

Around 1983 I got a Morrow Microdecision with two floppies.

No hard drive or mouse. It did come with COBOL.

It failed after 23 lines of text entry. Turned out the CPU was defective.

People kept asking me, "Dude, what do you need a computer for?"

Two years later you could get an Amiga 500, with 512KB for £499. They were such a deal when they arrived. I bought a 20MB hard drive, an extra 512KB of RAM, a second floppy drive and a monitor. If I recall correctly that set me back around £1400.

Today, you can buy microcontrollers with this much RAM + Flash-ROM for like $5 USD. No joke.

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/renesas-electronics-america-inc/R7FA4E10D2CNE-AA0/15203348

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/microchip-technology/ATSAM4N8BA-MU/4162590

These modern $5 microchips probably have more features people care about too. Also they go like 100MHz on 3V and like 50mA (or less) of current. Or ~150mW of power or so and are therefore suitable to be run off of AA batteries.

The conversion is wrong. £1500 in 1985 is £5814.92($7,359.45) today.

Who remembers the Sinclair ZX-80 with a massive 1kb ram?!

We actually had one of those Macintosh 128 K machines in the lower left. My dad got two external floppy drives for it. The first lesson I remember learning, that I still remember is when the dialog box asks:

{Disk Read Error, [Abort][Retry][Initialize]?}

Initialize is Never ever ever the correct option.

i'm surprised nobody is mentioning that the keyboards in these were masterpieces that are so valuable today.

We had an Apple II+, IIe and //c. I would inherit each one when my family upgraded. They were around $1300 each I think. The //c might have been more because it was "portable" (you could put it in a suitcase with a 10-pound battery and a weird tiny horizontal screen that wouldn't work with most software).

My grandparents had a C-64 which they never used. It basically became mine. I think it was $600.

Don't get the Sanyo. It's a weird "sorta DOS compatible" machine you'll have a hard time with software and support for.

The Apricot was also exotic, but seemed to have more of an ecosystem.

Interestingly mac is the only one with a mouse.

My grandfather's glorious Olivetti proudest pc-1,paid 11million lirae (about 6.000€ euros) with an 8mhz CPU and well over 512kB of ram!

(from Wikipedia, the house burned down in 2001)

Apricot? So there were 2 pc makers with connection to fruit? Or Macintosh is not yet Apple then?

There was some commercial for the Commodore 64 which basically lambasted the IBM PC for being twice as expensive while having the the same 64K memory.

I was, like, "yeah, but nobody ever bought the 64K model of IBM PC. That would have been just ridiculously limited, right? Right? Everyone got memory expansions, surely?"

Well, 64K was the stock configuration, so I'm sure those memory expansions sold like hotcakes. There was even the option for freaking 16K memory. (Now, I'm sure next to nobody bought that.) Even option to getting no floppy drives, because you could always put your glorious BASIC programs on a cassette tape. Like a caveman. (This also sounds like a rare option.)

My father bought a family pc for 1500ish euros (or equal to that amount) vack in.. 1990 or something. With a 386 cpu.

It was great. Though im not sure if the inflation is equal, in my country

I remember my dad paying $800 for 8 megabytes of RAM.

Shit was expensive back then