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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!"
would imply that this is duplication and distribution of copyrighted material without the knowledge, consent, or license of the copyright holder.
What does this imply about the intersection of copyright law and natural rights?
I suspect that was actually from later than 1981.
In 1980, I spent $269 for 16k RAM for my TRS-80.
That was 4116s, too. I can't believe I spent nearly an order of magnitude too much, since I watched prices in 80-Micro and Byte like a hawk.
My (ahem) memory could be failing, but I think this may have been more recent than 1981...
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
Amazing, appearantly he can switch the goatse redirection on and off. It's currently off.
I really wanted one of those Corvus drives about that time. You could hook your Apple ][ up to them, several simultaneously, in fact. They functioned like a rudimentary network. If I coulda had a whole 10 *MB*... that would have been like having 70(!) simultaneous 143K floppy disks worth. The warez board I would have run....
That remind me, I should pick up a few more drives, and finish off my home Terabyte...
To me, what is even more striking than the change in computer technology is the change in marketing! Everytime I see an early 80s advertisement, I just want to laugh at the naivete. Is this presentism, or have modern ads really become that much more compelling?
n 1980, I spent $269 for 16k RAM for my TRS-80.
:)
Ugh, that's way worse than me first populating my Apple II 1mb RAM card at about $100 per 128k with those silly bank of 8 chips. I was forever bending those little feet. I almost got a woody when Macs with SIMMS came along.
Did anyone else notice how incredibly detailed the specifications for these devices were in the catalogue. I mean these days a floppy drive listing rarely exceeds 2 sentences.
hmmmm... I have actually shredded my credit cards and have one debit card used for gas and internet purchases.
Cash makes the perfect budget, can spend what you don't have.
Just remember I think it is Sears that makes more money on financing than they do selling stuff. My understanding is that this is becoming the norm.
Yes, I know my post if offtopic.
is that on their company backgroung page they actually 'fess up to service problems and mistakes as their company grew. It's hard to imagine a company - even a startup - doing that in these current days.
So if you were to buy 1 gig at those prices it would cost: $1,048,576.
Prices sure have come down huh?
Try asking for the 3% back if you pay by cash. I once bought something for around $900 and insisted that if they didn't give me the 3% back I'd use American Express (6.4% at the time from memory)
I remember printing pages of BASIC source code with one of these things. At 25cps I could usually type faster than this thing count print.
I once reprogramming the horizontal and vertical motion rates and printing lots and lots of periods to print really ugly bitmap images.
They have?
I don't know about the rest of you, but I've still got a terminal from '81 still up and working within arms reach of me. Poor thing doesn't even know vt100, fortunately some OSes still have qvt in their termcap (most don't
I've got a new Tandy Color Computer 80 with monitor in my closet (new in box, only opened and used once!). (I can also get a hold of one that is still in mint condition, outer box hasn't even been opened.
If it wasn't for the multi-GHz computer I'm tying on, it would still be 1981 around here...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The credit card compaines got on them about it. Declared if you didn't offer credit for same as cash pricing, they'd yank your verification system so you couldn't take cards anymore. There are actually several ongoing lawsuits about this (companies claiming this an unfair practice).
Since the average guy has to run the spam filter, virus scanner, Service Pack 12, pop-up blocker and spy-ware removal tools, his new Dell runs about the same today as those did. Why did we have to go from 4.77 Mhz to > 3000 Mhz and and not see near 1000 fold increase in snappyness? Because of all the freakin' 3l337 haxor d00d, because-I-can-spammer's, Gaim a**holes, MS programming school of buffer mangement & X10 snakeoil salesmen.
Somewhere in my parent's house is a 1990 issue of Computer Shopper with the world's only 4GB hard drive at the time (by IBM). price: $20,000
I kept that around just to look back at times like this.
Remember 15+ years ago when a lot of products would feature in advertisements that they were made in the USA? A lot of it was a reaction to perceived threat from Japan and the thought of NAFTA. In current times that is a rarity, globalization aside. Even though people are buying Mercedes made in Alabama and tech support from India, it would be interesting to see a return of promotional campaign designed to promote goods made in the US. Perhaps there can be a similar campaign designed to promote companies that don't use overseas labor?
Check out this unix ad, also from 1981 (hi Bob! -dp). Brought to you by Bell Labs. It's amazing how times have changed......
I was building my own computer in 1981. It had a 1 MHz 6502 processor, 1024 bytes of RAM, Teletype terminal, and paper tape program storage.
Mods should visit Anti-Slash daily to see a running list of posts to avoid. They have a list of trick posts on their front page for their amusement.
You'd be amazed at the amount of duped +5 posts from the past that get modded up again and again, thanks to their database tool that stores +5 posts from every article. Trolls repost past +5s to get more karma for their troll accounts.
But check page 31.
:-)
Microsoft charged quite a bit 20+ years ago for a compiler and still does.
Amazing how they get away with their pricing.
Thank you Linux and GCC for saving my butt
In 1990, The Family Business paid ~8,000USD for an HP system that ran SCO Xenix, FoxBase+ and had:
- 486DX25
- 8MB RAM
- 2x 340MB HDD
- QIC-02 120MB tape drive
- an 8-port multi-serial card
- an HP dot-matrix printer
- 8x dumb terminals
Worked great for 8 years. HP made durable stuff back then...."I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
funny that you mention eniac and von neumann in the same post. i know it's humor, but von neumann published what eckert and mauchly *couldn't* publish since they were under military classification at the time. so, naturally, everyone forgets about them.
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
I think alot of people misunderstood my post. Probably my fault as I wasn't entirely clear.
I don't think it's a shame that this has happened. I just think it's interesting. It's a throwback to a different era, when even little nowhere towns in the middle of Pennsylvania could fabricate chips, and tiny tech startups were happening in Florida and Oklahoma and everywhere. I really have no position whatsoever on whether or not it's better this way or that way, I just thought it was interesting.
The thing that really shocks me is the forthright and honest wording in the page. In the third paragraph they admit that sometimes they were in too far over their heads, but they are trying their best. Good luck finding any company stump material today that doesn't proclaim them to be the infallible Word of God concerning technology X.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
OK -- sub par car's? Car's that consistlently fall in the bottom of reviews? American car's that perform in the lower half of the curve?
Or -- from the recent auto show locally -- SUV's who's body panels don't line up so badly that you can't open the doors? (That car should never have been at the auto show -- why did the dealer bring it?)
Poor build quality?
Outdated technology?
High price/low functionality?
Do you have a better example?
Thats nothing. I was never quoted (since I'm not famous) but I once said around the same time that we would never needs modems faster than 300 baud. My reasoning? I cant read faster than 300 baud. When the 1200 baud modems came out, the text would scroll by so fast that I couldn't keep up. Obviously, I didnt forsee downloading graphics and music, let alone the web.
Back in the late 80's/early 90's I was working for a small computer company that also advertised in Byte and our ads (some done in part by yours truly) were just like that. The reason was that at the time most such companies were selling to engineers and other technical people who wanted *specs* above all. Pictures were nice, but they wanted technical details. If we skimped on detail and tried to insert product photos instead, we were deluged with customer support calls asking if we could fax over spec sheets to interested readers.
This was at the very beginning of PC desktop publishing. The memory in our Canon laser printer cost more than the printer itself. I would write ad copy in XyWrite, the owner took product photographs then the bunch of us would sit around a big table with a hot wax roller and X-Acto knives and paste up the ad. Then downstairs to the big Agfa stat camera to produce the final incarnation which was then mailed off to the magazines. I sure learned a lot of odd stuff at that job for a 23 y-o electrical engineer
When the company was sold (to a group of morons headed by the canonical PHB), we were told that our ads were too dense and hard to read, so they brought in all these marketing consultants who prepared jazzy colorful ads at 2x the cost (we paid $20,000 for a 2page B&W ad in Byte and it easily paid for itself every month, the ads they produced cost over $50,000
Needless to say, the new ads sucked in terms of response. The PHB would not accept that the ugly ads designed by engineers for engineers were actually resulting in more sales than his expensive ones and refused to go back. Sales plummetted, company lost tons of money, went tits up. Been there, done that, got my T-shirt ripped off!
We actually had one ad (we even had a copy under glass!) that cost $80,000 in marketing and placement fees and resulted in exactly ZERO product inquiries. The only thing they did right was to track ad responses!
OK, done with that particular rant for the moment