Old School Computer Ads - 10MB Hard Disk for Only $3398!

Ah! A nerd, then? The old software vs hardware dynamic seems to work, though.

a reply to: Benevolent Heretic

How many IBM SE's does it take to screw in a light bulb?






None. Its a hardware problem.


(joke from 1973)

My first microcomputer was a Zylog Z80 on a Digital Group (Denver I think) motherboard. 10K ram, cassette tape 'mass' storage. Funky keyboard put together by myself, and a TV typewriter monitor.

The motherboard was not very well built, and a buddy 'tinned' all the traces by hand to give it some robustness.

This may be an apocryphal story, but it is said that the very first Multiple Mirror Telescope (Mount Hopkins in Southern Arizona) was controlled by the exact same Digital Group Z80 that I had.

a reply to: Klassified

Dual Floppies. Uh Huh.

I won a T-shirt from Seagate ( I think it was ) at the West Coast Computer Faire, in 19 mumbly, mumbly. They were promoting their floppy disk drives and the T-shirt read... wait for it...

"I have dual floppies"

It took me more than 10 years to find someone who was willing to wear that shirt and she was absolutely delighted with it.

a reply to: Benevolent Heretic

It is amazing how far tech has come......I remember my first computer a commodore 64 and having to use DOS. And than the commodore 128 came out.......It was amazing back in the 1980s. Nintendo was the coolest thing ever when it came out.....Tecmo Bowl and the 4 plays you could choose. I can still here the sound the ball made when passed. Contra.......I loved Contra.

a reply to: SubTruth

I remember my first computer a commodore 64 and having to use DOS

Ah yes. The wonderful 1541 drives that would bang themselves out of alignment. Still, better than a cassette deck.

Run/Stop/Restore

a reply to: Phage

Remember that fractal-rendering-program which used the floppy's processor as a co-processor? Pretty advanced stuff then

Ah yes, those were the days..


'81: ZX-81 (first 1kb, then 16kb, my dad purchased for his the hefty 64kb RAM!), cassette tape
'83-4: C= 116, cassette tape and some ROMs
84-5': C= 128 (lots and lots of hardware, you just had to have that! 2x 1571, 1581, Z80-H, doubled V-RAM, 512kb RAM disc, later even the 20mb HDD with Shugart-parallelport-interface. What else?... Dolphin-Dos, could double the CPU's clock via switch but a blank screen). Nicely patched CP/M.
'93: PCs, starting with a 486/DX50

a reply to: SubTruth

I had the Atari 800XL, 1984 I think I got it, my brother got the Commodore VIC20.....both computers still exist and work today, or at least they did last year when I dragged them out of my parents attic.

Hall of the mountain king and Q-Bert were two of the most frustrating games ever.

My first experience of disks (5 1/4") came with an Amstrad PC1512 my dad got in 1986....8086 processor, 512k RAM, awesome 16 colour CGA graphics and no HDD.....we didn't become a HDD family until a few years later when we got a 80286 system made by Research Machines, had a whopping 20MB drive!

Now I remember why I didn't get in to computers when I was at high school in the 80's - they sucked.

I regret it now, a sedentary work life would have suited me well.

The other memory this brings back is how you could spend thousands on the best piece of machinery and then within a few years an inferior one won out in the market and it was obsolete, couldn't connect it to anything else you owned or your friends owned or your industry owned. So the decision you made could cost or save you thousands.

Back in the early 80s my employer plunged into PCs for the workplace and got the first model IBM with dual floppies, 640k ram, 8088 @ 4.7MHz along with a Tallgrass HDD (25Mb and inbuilt tape backup) and a dot matrix printer. That little bundle cost them over $20k back then (with the Tallgrass being the most expensive item on the list).

Prior to that leap into the modern era I was toying with a Z80, 4k of ram, self-modified old portable TV for a B&W monitor and no OS. I had to assemble my own code by hand and enter it in hex from a keyboard but I did learn a lot more that way (1 byte at a time

originally posted by: rnaa
a reply to: Klassified

Dual Floppies. Uh Huh.

I won a T-shirt from Seagate ( I think it was ) at the West Coast Computer Faire, in 19 mumbly, mumbly. They were promoting their floppy disk drives and the T-shirt read... wait for it...

"I have dual floppies"

It took me more than 10 years to find someone who was willing to wear that shirt and she was absolutely delighted with it.

Now that's funny.

Ive got a C= Amiga b2000hd here. ECS chipset, scsi hd. One day im gonna refurb it properly and have it in the workroom set up permanently but so far all ive done is cut the old cmos clock battery off so it doesnt rot the motherboard. It works but is very tobacco stained as it was used in a local business to do subtitling on a betting shop display.

Imagine doing backup or installs from 5.25 floppies now.

"Insert disk 1366 and press return"

a reply to: Benevolent Heretic

Thanks for sharing this. This type of old add always cracks me up, bith for the add itself but also how far we have come in such a short time.

It still wrecks my brain every time i think that the phone i hold in my hand is more powerful than a fair few of my old pc's!

originally posted by: Phage
a reply to: SubTruth

I remember my first computer a commodore 64 and having to use DOS

Ah yes. The wonderful 1541 drives that would bang themselves out of alignment. Still, better than a cassette deck.

Run/Stop/Restore

load "*",8,1

originally posted by: Aldakoopa

You got any proof? I googled and can't find any such processor. I did find the first 1THz "chip" (not processor) made by DARPA last year, but nothing about an Intel cell processor 6 years ago.

I bet you're thinking of the Intel Polaris, otherwise known as the Tera-Scale Teraflop Prototype, which had teraflop performance but didn't have a THz clock.

I'm a bit of a youngin, so my first PC was a 486 SX by Tandy. Had a 66 mhz processor, 8 MB of RAM, a 200MB HDD, and a 14.4k modem. I saved up enough money to upgrade it to a 56k modem, and convinced my mom to get a dial-up internet service.

Installing that modem was one of the most satisfying experiences in my life, and started me down a path that led to me being here in the JP doing IT for a major corporation.

And a life-time a internet servitude. I am slave to HTTP.

Halp.

a reply to: Benevolent Heretic
Yeah. 1973. The first disk drive I ever bought, for the company I worked for, was 500KB (no, not MB. KB). It required a 19-inch equipment rack 5 feet tall. And it cost $50,000 in 1973 money. It was the primary disk for a PDP-11/15.

RAM in 1973? A buck a byte for hand-woven magnetic core memory.

originally posted by: Klassified
a reply to: Benevolent Heretic

What A Bargain.

That price looks really high. I bought my first computer around that time and it was a 386 with a 20 MB hard drive. I don't remember the exact price but it was less than $500. It wasn't a Tandy but it basically had all the same capabilities as the one in the ad.

I grew up on Apple computers. So...yeah.

It sucked because there wasn't many games for them.

Had the Macintosh SE
Mac Quadra 650
iMac SE (graphite)
Powermac G4

originally posted by: Terminal1
I was so jealous because we would go to the Virginia Tech library and find programs in magazines

Myself and a friend used to do that, we'd buy a magazine that had several pages of hex that promised a working game. It was always in a very very small font! One of us would read it while the other typed it. Of course there were always printing mistakes (deliberate) which meant if we couldn't work out where the mistakes were we'd have to buy next weeks mag.

Do you guys remember PC Magazine used to ship with CD's full of demos and...well basically crap?!

LOL and all those AOL/Prodigy CDs...I swear...