1981 Personal Computer Catalog

edibobb writes "I just fired up my scanner and uploaded the 35-page 1981 (+/- 1 year) personal computer catalog from American Small Business Computers. 16K RAM for $22; 10 megabyte hard drive, 5 meg fixed and 5 removeable, with 14-inch platters; 25-character per second printer. Things have changed a bit since then!"

Comments

Here I sit

[GlassUser]

Watching it die. Didn't finish the index, so I decided to let it load one image. 33% and it seems to be decreasing exponentially.

Phone number

[kavachameleon]

The phone number given is now the phone number for Upperspace. They make CAD software.

Re:Phone number

[zjbs14]

Same company, different products. Back in the later 1980's they released Design CAD as a low-cost alternative to AutoCAD. My parents' company actually used to by Corvus stuff from these guys.

If you've ever been to Pryor, OK, you'd be amazed that anything technical would have come from a town like that.

Re:Remember Bill Gate's quote?

[Chess_the_cat]

You must be the last guy on earth to believe he actually said that. He didn't.

Mirror...

[Copperhead]

I mirrored the site here since his site doesn't seem to be weathering the storm. If you see broken images, it's because I'm still wgetting it.

I'll take it down if he wants me to, of course, but I thought it would help.

Re:ah, the trs-80 color computer

[Anonymous Coward]

Er...that would be John Conway's Game of Life. Less fragging.

Old computer magazine

[slapout]

Slighty off topic, but related:

the classic computer magazine archive at http://www.atarimagazines.com/ has the text from some issues of Antic, STart, and Creative Computing magazines.

Wikipedia

[cos(0)]

Wikipedia is amazing -- it even has an entry for The Magic Wand word-processing software advertised on one of the catalog's pages:

Magic Wand (software)

Re:MOD PARENT DOWN - DISGUSTING PHOTO

[Bryan Ischo]

Check others' comments as well. The grandparent poster (that I originally responded to) is changing the linked-to photos to be either goatse.cx or the correct photos as needed to get moderator points. If you go there at the wrong time you will definitely get a nasty photo. People who do this are socially retarded.

Re:Oh man

[Kardamon]

Baud: Pronounced bawd, the number of signaling elements that occur each second. The term is named after J.M.E. Baudot, the inventor of the Baudot telegraph code.
At slow speeds, only one bit of information (signaling element) is encoded in each electrical change. The baud, therefore, indicates the number of bits per second that are transmitted. For example, 300 baud means that 300 bits are transmitted each second (abbreviated 300 bps ). Assuming asynchronous communication, which requires 10 bits per character, this translates to 30 characters per second (cps). For slow rates (below 1,200 baud), you can divide the baud by 10 to see how many characters per second are sent.
At higher speeds, it is possible to encode more than one bit in each electrical change. 4,800 baud may allow 9,600 bits to be sent each second. At high data transfer speeds, therefore, data transmission rates are usually expressed in bits per second (bps) rather than baud. For example, a 9,600 bps modem may operate at only 2,400 baud. (Definition from webopedia)