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
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.
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Hey, I recognize you from this comment! You flipped that switch so many decades ago, ruining everything I had worked so hard for. I’ll always remember.
Those lost 50KB of work will forever be etched into my mind. Quite literally: the second I get my hands on a 30TB neurolink you bet your goddam ass I’m making a 50KB text file with your name on repeat, so that I’ll always hear your name echo in my thoughts. “u/Kalkaline@programming.dev flipped my surge protector’s switch”, for x in range infinity
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.
We actually had one of those Macintosh 128 K machines in the lower left. My dad got two external floppy drives for it. The first lesson I remember learning, that I still remember is when the dialog box asks:
{Disk Read Error, [Abort][Retry][Initialize]?}
Initialize is Never ever ever the correct option.
Assuming “Initialize” reformatted the disk and preped it to be used fresh?
Correct, and that could be very problematic depending on the disc I had grabbed
The conversion is wrong. £1500 in 1985 is £5814.92($7,359.45) today.
I just googled the conversion of the price from 1985 to today based on inflation and then googled the exchange rate between the current value in GBP to USD.
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)
I remember my dad paying $800 for 8 megabytes of RAM.
Shit was expensive back then
Who remembers the Sinclair ZX-80 with a massive 1kb ram?!
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.
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.)
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.
@umbraroze C64 caveman with datasette drive reporting in o7
Was Olivetti any good at that time?
I used 3 of those. That Compaq was about as “portable” as a suitcase stuffed with a corpse. Great machine though when you needed it!
I miss the green and black screen though.
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.
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, 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
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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.
Psh, $5700 and they don’t even come with a 4090.
Seriously, though, it’s no wonder why businesses had most of computers in the 80s; these companies were ripping people the hell off and getting away with it. Nearly $6 grand and you don’t even get a hard drive, nor a reasonable amount of RAM. Give me a fucking break.
