And keep in mind that there was no internet to get onto back in the day, so it was all about typing term papers and doing pretty drawings with.
Monday, August 27, 2012
Crap, expensive computers from the 80s
And keep in mind that there was no internet to get onto back in the day, so it was all about typing term papers and doing pretty drawings with.
First of all, Macpaint was the greatest paint program there ever was. And it some pretty awesome games, Airborne, Art of War and Strip Poker. I think all of them fit on one floppy drive. It was the last time owning a Mac was better than owning PC
ReplyDeleteMy first modem: 600 bayd, $350.
ReplyDeleteMy first hard disk: 45 megs, $1200.
My most recent hard disk: 2 TerraBytes, $100.
Back around 1990, my father splurged nearly $20,00 a high-end Macintosh for his design business, and over the years, we designed many art books for the Museum of Fine Arts, for which my father got elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.
ReplyDeleteThen, I found a website that would calculate how much you'd be worth if you bought Apple shares at a given time instead of a computer.
Well, had he bought stock instead of a computer, he'd be worth $5 million...
I still have 4 of these earliest puppies in storage. All have Jobs and 41 original employees signatures inscribed on inside of case.
ReplyDeleteHope to recoup my early investment one day soon.
I had one of those. Loved it. This was back in the day when the Mac didn't have a fan – Steve Jobs held out the ideal of an entirely silent computer, which it was unless it was reading or writing to disk. It cooled by convection, but eventually they would overheat and smoke would come out of the top.
ReplyDeleteNo surprise that early consumer technology was expensive.
ReplyDeleteThe first colour TV sets were priced way above what the average person could afford, and in any case there were very few actual colour broadcasts until the mid to late 1960s when monochrome black and white was phased out for good. I think the first time I even saw a colour TV was in the airport lounge or bar.
The first pocket calculators were also very expensive. See this: http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/busicom_le-120a___le-120s.html
Nowawadays. of course, they are available as small as a credit card and are often given away free as a sales promo.
Glad I delayed making a decision to buy a new Commodore or Amiga computer because my brother-in-law gave me his old PC when he upgraded to a later model.
Back in late 1987, I purchased an Apple IIGS system which cost me just a hair under $4,000. All that money for just a computer (with 768K RAM), keyboard, mouse, color screen, two floppy drives and a printer.
ReplyDeleteAll Apple equipment of course, which you paid a premium for. How much a premium you ask? Even with a student discount, my 3.5" floppy drive was $465.00 before tax! Or how about $745.00 for my dot-matrix printer, not even including the cost of an interface cable or color ribbon!
Apple at the time had two major product lines: the Macintosh and the Apple II. Unfortunately this computer was from the latter camp which Apple ended up abandoning support for. All that money and getting dropped like a rock about three years later.
Ah well, I still have a Macintosh 128K soon in that ad. Useless little machine (even back in '84), but an interesting piece of history no doubt. Thankfully that I bought at a thrift shop a few years ago for $4, as opposed to $4,000+ like its original owner. ;)