How much would you pay for a PC with 128KB RAM, and no hard disk?
In today’s money (inflation adjusted)
This an ad from Personal Computer World (UK) from 1985
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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.
My Dragon 32 or 64 (can’t remember which it was) has a lot to answer for too!
Whole bunch of low cost 8-bit machines in that era, the Dragon 32, Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC ranges to name but a few. Of course we must also mention the BBC Micro, was not low cost but every school had one if you grew up in the UK.
We had one in my school in Ireland too (and I think they were common in schools here) but tbh none of the teachers knew how to use it and so we got very little time on it in school.
So true! My parents got me the C64 when I had no idea about computers. I loved the Spectrum+ my buddy had at the time but always wanted the C128 another friend of mine got. My parents eventually upgraded my computer to an Amstrad CPC6128 when they saw that I was actually programming in BASIC. I learned a lot from that computer too, e.g. Fortran, Pascal, a bit of Z80 assemly (the last one was horrible!)
Hey ZX-81 gang here!
999SKR (Swedish crowns) guess it was like 100$ and it gave you a 1KB 1Mhz computer :-) around 400SKR more for an expansion card with a whopping 16KB…
Went the C64 way but damn that Spectrum was sexy back in the day.
ZX81 here too! Bought 500FF in 1981 iirc, in kit.
BTW did you solder it yourself?
Clavier membrane team !
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.
That’s a great story. Thank you for sharing.
I wish I knew what happened. It still bothers me.
Today, you can buy microcontrollers with this much RAM + Flash-ROM for like $5 USD. No joke.
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.
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)
It’s crazy how Computers have changed over the years !
I guess people who have used PC’s from the old era would be able to appreciate the current Computers in a completely different level.
When I remember back to the early 80s, me a single digit aged human with my first Commodore 64 and a cassette tape drive, to being a high school aged kid and helping my buddies install their extended memory set chip by chip to get them to 1mb of ram, to way in the future where I type this comment on a mobile phone touch screen capable of unfathomable high resolution graphics and speed is still a surreal feeling.
I grew up and grew old with computers and it’s wild to imagine a life without and a world without them nearly 50 years later.
The old computers from my childhood still boots faster than any modern OS 😎
A computer with a spreadsheet was a HUGE game changer.
In '85 most companies did books by hand and adding machine. Records were kept in ledgers and in filing cabinets. People used to hire CPA’s to come in and do the balancing even in small convenience stores. Given labor wasn’t what it is now, but a machine like that could pay for itself pretty quickly.
I worked a fast food job in the 90’s They had an ancient box running 1-2-3. Every night, the MOD would have to sit down with a paper sheet and an adding machine to generate this table, then enter all the transformed data into Lotus. They literally sat back there for hours working over the data. I asked, why don’t you just change the sheet to do all the calculations? Can’t, the franchise owner wants it all done by hand. They were literally taking a row of numbers, doing some math on it, then doing more math on each column to come up with a final row of like 7 numbers.
I had them show me what they were doing and wrote a program on my TI calculator to generate the table from the input numbers. Told them if they wanted the program just to get the same calculator and I’d transfer it over.
Nobody trusted computers… they were ‘new’. It wasn’t entirely unheard of for people to verify the output of a computer by hand, or as in your case, doing it by hand intentionally.
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)
Adjusted for inflation, I’m pretty sure that today’s PCs are still cheaper than this.
eh. Money is worth a third of what it was worth.
Today you can buy a budget pc, and skim on performance, but back then (and I was there man!) you could not.
For PCs? Maybe not, but you could get plenty of other types of home computer for reasonably cheap. A Commodore 64 was $150 in 1985, for instance. Just had to stay away from the absolute bleeding edge.
Also, these PCs back then were heavy (=>much more resource intensive), handbuilt and low-volume. All things that add a lot to the price.
I don’t know about resource intensive, today you need a frigging powerplant to feed a decent PC. At least the 286 and onwards didn’t consume that much right?
Edit: It was not about running costs but the resources to Build them, and that’s true for sure! Sorry!
I think they mean resource intensive as in it literally took more physical material to build them, which costs more.
Ah okay, that’s totally true.
Resource intensive to make. If you have a PC that consists of 20kg steel and other materials, that’s gonna add to the price.
True true!
I was there too but vga was not. My dad got an IBM XT fully specd as a home computer (he was CFO of Emma EDB). I believe the hires could be EGA or probably Hercules as they don’t brag about colours - but his had CGA. The full spec of my dads pc - that changed my life - was: 2x256kb ram on full length isa cards. 10mb hdd, 360kb floppy. 9pin printer and cga. Total cost back then in Norwegian KR was 120000.
After checking with my dad the price was half of what I stated. He got one for home and one for office - the business he was with was providing IBM mainframes, and wanted to check out the PC. My dad got them because of Lotus 1-2-3 - spreadsheets was the shit in accounting/ finance already
Might be right, could have been ega. It was a long time ago and the mind is wobbly.
yea 8086 couldn’t drive a vga. 16 preset ugly colors if you’re lucky. unless you had a magical amiga with dedicated graphics chips to do 256 colors, 4096 if you’re nasty.
Sir, I’ll have you know that I had an IBM PS/2 Model 25 with 256 glorious colors in MCGA. And fuck every developer that didn’t support MCGA, because it dropped down to 4 color CGA if not. No support for EGA.
Oh those raster hacks and stuff…
Interestingly mac is the only one with a mouse.
Apple was a very different company back then. If they had followed the philosophy they have today, Apple would have been the last company to to introduce a mouse. The idea is that if a new feature becoms industry standard, they won’t apply it until like 5 years later, but make it somehow better than anyone else.
In this context, it would have probably meant not including a keyboard or display at this point. They could have skipped the black+green stage and go straight for color displays while increasing the resolution, size and refresh rate or something.
Waiting 5 years wasn’t really an option back in those days. PCs moved so fast that if you waited 5 years you’d be missing whole use cases.
Now if you wait 5 years, there’s hardly a difference.
Not very surprising considering their inspiration from xerox parc. I bought a mouse in 86 for my dads pc - a 3 button Genius. On PC mouse would not take off until windows was launched - gui was not needed for real business use according to IBM
That mouse was so uncomfortable. It was built like a box, probably designed for a robot hand.
Yep - but it was the only one available in my area of Norway at the time (I got mine for under 500 NOK because the supplier did wrong. As I was just a kid he let it slide and I got to keep it. There was some painting software supplied as well. That guy went on to be one of Norways biggest producers of pc’s - REC computers
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.
Those are antiques now so the might cost a lot as well
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?”
Serious question: What did you use that computer for? So, did you just learn to write cobol and make your own programs?
I just used it for writing papers in college.
I had no idea how to use COBOL.
Ok, so it was more like a digital typewriter to you.
I do have a funny story about the place I got it in San Francisco, of you care to hear it.
Absolutely! Please do continue.
So what’s the story man? Come on, some of us are invested already.
I don’t know about the OP, but our first computer was a TRS-80 clone with a tape drive, 16k ram, and stunning 64x16 B&W graphics. Every month dad would drive us to computer club, we’d copy as many games as we could (onto tape), then spend the rest of the month trying to get them to work. Rinse and repeat. It was awesome.
Also typed in basic games from the computer mags which needed lots of debugging. How I learnt to program (before being taught Pascal in high school).
Typing in the games could be both fun and highly frustrating. I had an Apple II and if you fucked up on a line, you probably weren’t going to be able to find it and fix it. There was no debugger and typing LIST would show you the whole thing and you couldn’t scroll up. So if you did it right, it was great. If you messed up somewhere, good luck.
I don’t remember much on the apple, but in commodore basic you could do LIST 50-80 for example, I’m willing to bet the apple could too…
You probably could and I just never knew it.
Apple is the second cheapest option. Damn, times have changed, for sure.
And to add it was the most advanced device compared to the others. Full mouse support, graphical interface, WYSIWYG , it was a true gamechanger.
Had a used one myself and soldered RAM chips on the MB to make it a fat Mac with 4MB RAM . Boot disk system was copied to a RAM disk after boot. Good times
It says it has a “high res monitor”. For having learned to program graphics on this machine, we had to count the pixels to be able to fit our drawings in the screen: 512x342, that’s not a lot of screen real estate. The 640x480 PC screen was a luxury.
And today that’s an icon.
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.
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.)
The IBM was Expandable to 640k, which Bill famously said “would be enough for anyone”!!
@umbraroze C64 caveman with datasette drive reporting in o7
We had a PCjr. Default was 64k, but we got the 64k sidecar add on for a whopping 128 kb of RAM. We also got a Hayes Smartmodem 1200 with the aluminum case and red LEDs that I still have, because it’s amazing even though it’s useless. Dad would use it to connect to Compuserv.
We never had the Chiclet keyboard, though - I think they were on to regular keyboards by the time we bought ours.
Apricot? So there were 2 pc makers with connection to fruit? Or Macintosh is not yet Apple then?
Macintosh was always Apple. Apricot may have been trying to ride on the coattails of Apple’s popularity (I remember the computers but I’m too lazy to look it up).
I don’t recall apricot and olivetti. But the other I have vague memories especially the Macintosh one. Compaq doesn’t count as it is still existing.
Olivetti originally made typewriters (we used to have one). Never heard of Apricot.
Olivetti, from Italy, was pretty famous in Europe as a typewriter manufacturer. So it wasn’t much of a surprise my father’s first PC (and the first PC compatible I could use) was Olivetti PCS 386SX, circa 1992.
Turns out Olivetti is surprisingly important in computer history too. Olivetti made Programma 101, which was the first programmable desk computer/calculator, way back in 1965. If NASA bought a bunch of these, I guess it was serious shit.
Thank you! This is interesting. I’d go to a Google/wikipedia/youtube rabbit hole now
Who remembers the Sinclair ZX-80 with a massive 1kb ram?!
I do, wonderful machine. You could get a 16K RAM pack (most did) that made a huge difference. Problem is, if an ant sneezed in the next town over it’d wobble loose and the machine would crash. A dab of Blu-Tac was just the ticket.
The ZX Spectrum came out 2 years later and was far more capable, and reasonably priced.
Ooh! I had a ZX-81 with a 16k ram pack on it (and cassette recorder to save with!) as a kid haha….god I’m old!!
Don’t mind me. Just showing off the Sinclair ZX Spectrum bag I got a couple of weeks ago. I’m nostalgic for 5 minute loading screens that could trigger an epileptic fit!
The 80s were a different time.
Shut up and take my money!
Oh that’s amazing!
The 80’s were certainly a different time. Especially when only allowed to access a computer at school for a few minutes in the day (Apple IIe) so all of us could “have a go at the computer in the library”!
I would never have imagined as a kid what it was going to be like today with smartphones and the internet everywhere….
You were lucky! We only had BBC’s in our computer room.
“Only had BBCs”. The best 8-bit computer of their generation? ONLY had a BBC? You have any idea how lucky we were growing up with those amazing machines in the 80s-90s? I owe my whole career to the BBC, with an honorable mention to the ZX Spectrum I had at home.
Even today, they’re still in use.
I guess I went to a well funded public school… In 1984-5 we had a whole bunch of apple ][s so we had an hour or so per week of programming in basic- I had a commodore 64 at home so I could do the classwork in the first 5-10 minutes, then spend the rest of the time playing with it to see what it could do…
I was starting writing here to correct you that it had 48KB (like the spectrums) but thought to check on wikipedia and… you are right! Oh my goodness! 1kb and called a computer! And was a computer!
I remember they had a space invaders type game for it, written and run IN 1k RAM!! Just amazing.
theres 1K programming demo contests now that would blow your mind. like https://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?type[]=1k
Possibly the worst keyboard ever too.
