[Stoat]

Naturally, I'm hoping y'all will post additional amusing and/or historical computer-related ads...I know you've got some saved ;-)

[Stoat]

“Thought you might be interested” ping

[Kartographer]

[bert]

My Color Computer came with 4k memory.

With great trepidation I cracked it and up graded to a whopping 64K

[Stegall Tx]

Bookmark for Monday’s class.

[ClearCase_guy]

If government would step away from health care, we might look back 30 years from now and marvel at how hideously expensive it all was back in 2012.

[upchuck]

1981: My software company employer had a PDP-11/70 running the RSTS/E operating system with a whomping one MEGAbyte of memory.

The machine was way overloaded and spent so much time housekeeping it had little time left for anything else. We bitched up a storm about lost productivity, etc.

Finally the powers that be agreed to a memory upgrade. They bought another one MEGAbyte of memory for $3,000.00.

Productivity soared. Technology is truly amazing.

[SnuffaBolshevik]

I can't remember how many bucketfuls of quarters I wizzed away on stuff like this at the arcade in the Mall way back when.

Probably enough, if saved, to now be a nice IRA.

[Future Snake Eater]

Holy crap! $20,000 for 300Mb of HDD!?

[qam1]

Xer Ping

Ping list for the discussion of the politics and social (and sometimes nostalgic) aspects that directly effects Generation Reagan / Generation-X (Those born from 1965-1981) including all the spending previous generations are doing that Gen-X and Y will end up paying for.

Freep mail me to be added or dropped. See my home page for details and previous articles.  

[central_va]

Wow 80Mb of memory for $12K. That is $150 per Mb.

I just bought an 8Gb flash thumb drive for 10 bucks. That is $1.9 X 10^-9 per Mb. UFB isn't it?

[reagan_fanatic]

My very first computer was a Timex Sinclair 1000 - 3.25mhz cpu, 2kb of ram and membrane keypad along with 64 columns and 48 rows of graphics. It was so weak that when it had to do a computation, the screen would blank out. Used a cassette drive to store data. $99 at the local Venture store. Man, I thought I was the bomb with that thing.

[Snickering Hound]

Huh, no disk drive, where is that graph coming from?

[BCR #226]

ping for a walk down memory lane... I feel old.

[martin_fierro]

Couldn't have made it through grad school without this thing.

Magnetic interference from the monitor would interfere with the floppy disk drives, so you had to separate the two with a stack of phone books.

[Chode]

[SunkenCiv]

As others noted, hard drive prices looked very reasonable back then, but storage requirements (and limitations) were much smaller also. The Sider 10 meg for the Apple line was $695, but when the 20 meg came out the price was the same, if memory serves. The first ad I saw (in InfoWorld) for a 1 gb drive had a price of $10K, and my geek buddy and I were impressed.

Apple IIgs emulator for the Mac:
http://www.google.com/search?q=bernie+][+the+rescue

[prisoner6]

Outside of the PDP-10 at the University of Pittsburgh and my trusty Texas Instruments red LED calculator, my first computer was a Timex Sinclair. Bought all the extras and then moved up to a Tandy Color Computer again with all the extras including that silly 4 inch wide 4 pen printer.

I used that to access FIDOnet and then Compuserve, GEnie, and a couple other services I dan't recall. One started with a "P", I think that is where I first ran into FReeRepublic in a chat room kinda thing.

Next up was a series of 8086 and 8088 based Tandys, SL and TX 1000 which I heavily modded. There was an Apple something in there too but I disliked it so much I hardly ever used it. Didn't play with Apple again until someone gave me a bunch in the mid 90's. It included an Early Mac SE complete with Grateful Dead sticker. I still have it somewhere.

I was using PC's at work and finally built my own after the Tandy's couldn't be modded anymore.

I can't recall ever buying a complete PC new but I could be wrong because of my partialheimer's. Right now I'm mainly using an IBM ThinkCentre dual core 3.2Ghz and it is rock solid so I won't upgrade until I absolutely have to.

My family is very into tablets right now. Three of us sit in the living room all on our own tablets - mine is an old Edge Pocket Dualbook - which is really silly!

In any case in the spirit of the thread there used to be a website that brought back real memories especially from the UofP and the PDP-10... www.asciigirls.com or.net or .org. It seems to be gone now, it's not even on the Wayback site.

Nerds like me would sit in the basement of the UofP punching cards and making ASCII art of Snoopy, Garfield and of course what we imagined REAL girls to look like.

After hours you'd end up with a print out that you could hang on a wall, stand back ten feet, squint and enjoy.

THOSE WERE THE DAYS!

Of course there's ASCCI art now on other sites but it's not the same...way too graphic and it's already coded for you...sigh.

[X-spurt]

Was that Gates in the Tandy Radio Shack ad?

[ShadowAce]

[ImJustAnotherOkie]

Excellent!!!

It sends a thrill down my leg....