When computers were sexy: Hilarious vintage ads from the early days of the PC (LOTS of graphics)

The Daily Mail (U.K.) ^ | April 1, 2012

[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.

[Telepathic Intruder]

My first computer was an XT with an 8088 processor, 4.77 MHz, 640K ram, no hard drive, two floppy drives, and a dazzling 4-color display monitor (including white). No internet of course. I probably had more fun with that one than any others since.

[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.

[bossmechanic]

My first was an AccessMatrix - amber monochrome screen, 2(!)7” floppy drives, dot matrix printer and acoustic modem cups built in. And it was CPM based. None of that MSDOS foolishness for me!

[bcsco]

I started with a Color Computer for the kids for Christmas, but wound up using it more than they did. Then, I went to an 8086, an 8Mhz with 256K (or was it 512...) RAM, a 20Mb HDD and two large floppies. Adding a modem, I was able to get to Compuserve. That 4 color monitor sure didn’t display games like the packages showed...

[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.

[Stegall Tx]

I upgraded my XT with a NEC V20 and got the boot time down to 60 seconds! Of course, I also had a 10 MB HD, a trade-off for keeping the green screen. </four yorkshiremen>

[y6162]

My first was a TRS Model III. Still have it sitting on a shelf. My first right wing post was made on Compuserve at 1200 baud.

[shove_it]

Me too. With wide printer and UPS it cost me somewhere in the $3k neighborhood, as I recall.

[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?

[SnuffaBolshevik]

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

No kidding.

And that was back when $20,000 was a LOT of money.
(A brand new 1979 Z/28 Camaro could be had for between $6500-8000).