Daddy Dee Posted November 4, 2007 Share Posted November 4, 2007 Is this for real? I wasn't really paying attention to PC's until I bought an XT clone in 1988. I spent $1500 or so. Basic price was $1K for an amber monitor, 20 MB hard drive and 640K Ram. I upgraded to a 30MB hard drive for $50 and EGA color and Logitech mouse for $450. Prices like this for a hard drive weren't up on my radar screen. How much did a PC cost about then? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Groomlakearea51 Posted November 4, 2007 Share Posted November 4, 2007 Remember the days well. My KayPro was dying and Kaypro was going out of business. My first PC was a Dell in late 1987 early 1988. State Attorney had one, and gave me a number in Austin, TX. He had just bought one and was using it in his office. Some guy named Michael answered the call... 3-4 weeks later and about $1300 "shorter", I had a 20 MB hard drive, 5.25 floppy, 2.5 "diskette", an amber 12" monitor. MS DOS 3.1, and "borrowed" a copy of "Word Perfect" from some company in Orem, Utah. Install disk was a single diskette..... Never looked back[H] Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
djk Posted November 5, 2007 Share Posted November 5, 2007 http://www.swtpc.com/mholley/Catalog4/Page23.jpg Circa 1980 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Daddy Dee Posted November 5, 2007 Author Share Posted November 5, 2007 now that's a big hard drive. about the size of a dorm room refrigerator if I'm comprehending the proportions. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mighty Favog Posted November 5, 2007 Share Posted November 5, 2007 About 81' or 82' in high-school I remember playing with a friend's Heath/Zenith Z80 and had three 1 inboard and two outboard 5 1/4 floppy drives totaling 1 meg. Ahhhh.........the days of monochrome. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
garymd Posted November 5, 2007 Share Posted November 5, 2007 I remember my 2nd year of college, turning in 14 inch stacks of punch cards before going home, coming back to the computer lab the next morning to find out I had a typo somewhere around the 8th or 9th inch. Now THOSE were the days! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mighty Favog Posted November 5, 2007 Share Posted November 5, 2007 Yea, we were on some IBM cardreaders around 5th grade. Didn't even have montitors on those things. Just what looked like a cash register's printout. We used to make a game of it to see if we could print out a whole roll doing math exercises. BTW- Still enjoying your vinyl records!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pauln Posted November 6, 2007 Share Posted November 6, 2007 Took the recovery and reverse engineering of alien technology from two crash sites, but look how far we've come today! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
oldbuckster Posted November 6, 2007 Share Posted November 6, 2007 A early computer filled half a house ................ Look at old NASA first flight into space footage, those computers took up almost all the space ........ Now, wireless laptops, really come a long way in a short time ........... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Daddy Dee Posted November 6, 2007 Author Share Posted November 6, 2007 Two crash sites? Roswell was first?, then what? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mike Lindsey Posted November 6, 2007 Share Posted November 6, 2007 I went to Computer Learning Center in 1982 after getting out of the Air Force and took their 6 month programming class (COBOL, COBOL II, Assembler and FORTRAN) and it was all done on punched card, and we had to do all the keypunching line-by-line... and like Gary said, if you made one mistake it cost you a day. When I got to my first programming gig 6 months later I saw my first computer with a monitor (DEC PDP 11/44), and it had those removable 10MB RL02 drives. I remember them showing me this stuff on my first day and I asked them where the key punch/card reader was. [] Yeah, those were the days... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mighty Favog Posted November 6, 2007 Share Posted November 6, 2007 If I look around long enough I bet I could find the Micrsoft Basic II programing ctg. for my Atari 800 (not the XL). Wonder what that would be worth to the "Microsoft Museum"??[] Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
garymd Posted November 6, 2007 Share Posted November 6, 2007 Back in the late 80s, my department spent over 15 grand on an HP plotter to print graphs. It was really cool to watch. The pen stood still while the paper moved vertically and horizontally. About 10 years later, I saw the exact model at a yard sale in my neighborhood for $15. No buyers. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jay481985 Posted November 6, 2007 Share Posted November 6, 2007 Funny.... I have a 1 Terabyte hard drive.... you know 1000 gigs, 1000000 megs Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Daddy Dee Posted November 6, 2007 Author Share Posted November 6, 2007 Funny.... I have a 1 Terabyte hard drive.... you know 1000 gigs, 1000000 megs Yeh, and what did it cost? something between $300 - $400? Amazing. That's alot of hard drive real estate for the buck. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kriton Posted November 6, 2007 Share Posted November 6, 2007 Ok, I guess I am a bit younger then some of you guys - when I was in highschool - we had those lovely monochrome TRS-80 Radioshack computers, where the coolest thing that you could possibly do was write the small program that would allow you to print some offensive saying over and over again on the green screen. (goto line 10, repeat) College, at Syracuse, they had DECwriters, no monitors, and the funky language called APL (freshman weed-out course) to manipulate blocks of numbers in different spatial references, and the noise from all those DECwriters in the bowels of the halls at 3 in the morning was deafening. Never could figure that language out, still have the workbook and screw around with the problems occasionally. Only computer I owned was an HP11C RP calculator, programmed every physics equation I could into that thing, then forgot what all I had programmed into it, rendering it useless... Post-grad, bought my first computer from a company that had retail stores, CompuAdd, remember them? Out of Austin TX too as I recall, a 286 SX small form factor, dual 5.25 and 3.5 floppy drive ,16 meg. ram (an upgrade), 20 meg HD, and *gasp* a color vga monitor - I was stylin' - with my Panasonic 1284 daisy wheel printer, I was making noise in my efficiency apt. till all hours - paid total over $2600.00 for that system, as I recall, and that was in 1989-90 or so...ah those were the days... K Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
boom3 Posted November 6, 2007 Share Posted November 6, 2007 I first saw a 1 GB HDD advertised in about 1992...for a cool $995, about 1 dollar per MB...considered an a amazing price/performance ratio. I cut my teeth on BASIC, doing programming stored on a cassette tape. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mighty Favog Posted November 6, 2007 Share Posted November 6, 2007 Ok, I guess I am a bit younger then some of you guys - when I was in highschool - we had those lovely monochrome TRS-80 Radioshack computers, where the coolest thing that you could possibly do was write the small program that would allow you to print some offensive saying over and over again on the green screen. (goto line 10, repeat) Something like: 10 ?"XXXXXX" 20 GOTO 10 I think that's how it went.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kriton Posted November 6, 2007 Share Posted November 6, 2007 That looks familiar - except we would leave the "computer lab" and put something really filthy on it about some teacher and let it scroll a thousand times...hehe, I was such an anarchist. K Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jay481985 Posted November 6, 2007 Share Posted November 6, 2007 Funny.... I have a 1 Terabyte hard drive.... you know 1000 gigs, 1000000 megs Yeh, and what did it cost? something between $300 - $400? Amazing. That's alot of hard drive real estate for the buck. around 300 and change Its not the cheapest per gig though, I think the 500 gig hard drive costing around 99 dollars is....... You pay the premium for the largest space on one hard drive. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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