Slashdot Mirror
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!"
One thing I notice is that 20+ years ago alot more high tech development seemed to have been happening all over the USA, instead of being highly concentrated in just a few places as seems to be the case now. Printers from Florida? Word Processors from Oklahoma? I remember reading the the original MOS chips were manufactured in PA in the 1970s! If I bought a printer today and the box said that it was manufactured anywhere other than Taiwan or China, let alone Florida or Oklahoma, I'd be shocked!
I don't see what's so special, it's just like taking the tour inside NASA.
- Sherman
Those guys in those suits. Did we really dress like that? Fuck I'm old.....
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
In this picture which one do you think is the compsci geek and which one is in league with the devil (aka the Marketing guy)?
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
If you click on any of the images from the site that he has mirrored, you get the goatse.cx photo. Parent poster is a retarded child.
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
I'm not upgrading my memory until it drops to a buck per K, a few months from now.
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.
funny munging
The phone number given is now the phone number for Upperspace. They make CAD software.
What do you think? 1970s Pr0n stars or computer salesmen? You be the judge!
Amazing, appearantly he can switch the goatse redirection on and off. It's currently off.
Things have changed a bit since then!
Yeah, the Slashdot effect hadn't been invented yet.
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...
You did all that ... and then posted it on /. ?
... you have a bigger set (or more bandwidth) than me!
I will say
A desire to cause pain to one's server, primarily though the Slashdot linking of an article that consists of nothing but large .jpg images. This condition should be treated immediately with extensive psychiatric care (the glowing and smoking remains of the server can be hosed down once the heat dies down enough to allow approach).
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
You must be the last guy on earth to believe he actually said that. He didn't.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
I'll take it down if he wants me to, of course, but I thought it would help.
Your reality is lies and balderdash and I'm delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever. - Baron Munchausen
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.
No threat of some lawsuit company charging you $699 for innocently using a nifty free OS.
Virus checker? Who needs it.
No DRM either
The gear shown in this catalog is the only equipment that current Corel products will run flawlessly on.
i had one of these, with 4K of memory... i remember programming john carmack's game of life in assembly language on that one, the 6509 instruction set... geez...
trs-80 color computer
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I found an old Fry's Electronics San Jose Mercury News ad section in a box of old papers at my father-in-law's house once a couple of moths ago. As a joke I replaced the ad in that day's newspaper with it. It was funny seeing his reaction later that evening when he browsed to the Fry's section to check out the day's deals as he normally does. It took a little while before he realized what was going on. Fry's ads from 1989 look almost identical to those of today, but the 386's listed for $2500 and dot matrix printers for $500 eventually tipped him off to the joke.
It's a stupid story, but I thought it was funny.
Holy crap, people actually paid more to use credit cards back then? People don't even carry cash anymore. I wonder how freaked out people would be now-a-days if I told them I was adding 3% to their purchase.
Twitter.com/TrentonHyatt
Things have changed a bit since then!
SOME OF US DO NOT HAVE THE FANCY MONEY TO SPEND ON 300 BAUD MODEMS AND EGA SCREENS AND HAVE TO MAKE DO WITH WHAT WE HAVE GOT. I RECENTLY SAVED UP TEN BUCKS TO BUY A 32K EXPANSION PACK FOR MY COMMODORE PET. IT IS NOT PRETTY BUT IT WORKS.
BEFORE YOU ASK HOW I AM ON THE ARPANET, I AM ACCESSING VIA PACKET RADIO SERVICE. MY NEAREST REPEATER IS 25 MILES AWAY AND THEN THE NEXT REPEATER ON HAS A FOURTEEN POINT FOUR KILOBIT MODEM CONNECTION TO THE ARPANET. I WAS SENT THIS MAIL BY A FRIEND OF A FRIEND WHO HAS WINDOWS AND HAVE READ IT AND AM WRITING THIS REPLY ON MY COMMODORE PET USING KA9Q AND PINE.
BEST REGARDS AND 73S
PETER COOPER
STATION WS47X
Oh my Gawd!!The hair!!Noo!!!
Parent is indeed a troll. Shot of goatse man instead of catalog page. (Blurred for your protection) It appears he is rotating the goatse man. Please mod down parent. Seems as though someone has way too much time on their hands and absolutely no life.
Thanks to the Slashdot effect, you get to see the catalog at 1981 speeds!!!
Catalog19.jpg on the skittlebrau mirror was "wholly" unexpected....
You think that's advanced technology, eh? You should come to my place sometime and check out my ENIAC. You have to be the 1337est of the '1337 to operate this thing. No hard drive. No mouse. No graphics... hell, there ain't even a CLI for cryin' out loud! (Real Programmers don't need no stinkin' user interface.) To enter commands into this baby, you gotta connect hundreds upon hundreds of wires, kind of like they did in the old telephone switchboards, where a human operator connected your call.
And best of all, this computer does it all.
- Want to multiply two numbers in just 3 milliseconds? Done.
- Want security even the likes of OpenBSD can't beat? Done.
The designers of this system knew what they were doing. The inability to store a program means that this system CANNOT get a virus, ever, period. Of course, then Von Neumann had to come along and invent stored programs, and the next thing you know, Outlook automatically executes email attachments...So... what would you expect the 6509 to be used for? It didn't have the math instructions of the 6809, but it (and the 6510) did have certain useful features when it came to making "personal computers" of the day.
it looks like the webhost is actually running the hardware from the catalogue
You tried your best, & you failed miserably,
The lesson is:
Never Try
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?
The pictures are loading about as fast as they would have from a BBS in 1981!
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
"We even have computers that can fit inside a single room!"
seriously though, I wonder what would happen if you were to call Epson tech support about a problem with your TRS-80 and the MX-70 printer.
when I was young we had to signal our computer orders (usally replacement beads for the abacus) with damp blankets using smoke signals.
And we liked it.
-pyrrho
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.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
.. for people who don't have enough sense to manage their money.
I have had a credit card since I was 18, I charge over $1000 on my cards a month.. I buy everything on credit card, including pay my bills. This way I maximize the free "points" my credit card gives me.
Guess how much I have paid in finance charges the past 6 years? I would say a max of 25 dollars *total*??? ( and that was only due to purposeful "letting it ride" for a few weeks since I was on vacation ).
50 dollars in finances for well over 600 dollars in rewards.
Seriously, credit cards are only "the devil" to people who have no will power. Just because I have thousands worth of credit in my pocket, doesn't mean I am about to go buy a car on my visa.
Not to mention if you charge something and you break it or it is stolen in the first 3 months, you can usually get a free replacement.. or if you get ripped off you can contest the charges. Try that with cash.
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.
"Yes, but does it run Linux?"
"Bill Gates said 640K ought to be enough for everyone." which is then followed by 10 variations of "Actually, Gates never said that."
"I actually owned one of those (insert archaic by modern standards technology here)" which is followed by another 10 variations of "That's nothing. We didn't even have those abovementioned technology because Big Bang just occurred and we only had hydoren and helium available, you insensitive clod!!"
Snooze...
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?
Posted by michael on Thursday April 29, @09:44PM
from the never-attended-skool dept.
idiotbob writes "I just fired up my scanner and uploaded the 1650-page (+/- 100 pages) 1998 Fall/Winter catalog from Sear and Roebuck in 300dpi, 24bit color, even the b&w pages! 100% Cotton V neck T-shirts (3 pack) for $12; Black and Decker cordless screwdriver, 40" Big screen Color TV, with remote control; Kingsize polyester bedspread ensembles in solid or floral pattern! Hosted on my home ISDN connection. Wow, things were different back then!
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
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.
I got it... 1...01...1...
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)
ByteCellar.com
Lend your support!
blakespot
-- Heisenberg may have slept here.
iPod Hacks.com
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.
Helium! Such luxury!
Share and Enjoy: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Check out this picture at HardOCP that I actually uploaded awhile back (they spelt my name wrong damnit!)
For a paltry $8499 in 1989 at RadioShack (Canadian dollars in 1989?) you got:
20 Mhz 80386
VGA graphics
2 MB RAM (up to 16MB capacity)
Cache memory.
Monitor and mouse not included.
I may actually still have that piece of paper somewhere. Not sure what that says about me.
Yes, they did that. Till the media found out that most of those 'American Made' goods where made overseas and ChinaMart was lying about it. 20/20 I think was the one that broke the story and did a primetime story about it.
Larry Lessig should use this as an example of how dumb our copyright laws are. As the RIAA and MPAA and most of Congress would have us interpret the law, this is a copyright violation.
Does that make ANY sense in the real world?
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
One bank of 8 chips would have been 64K or 256K, not 128K.
The Mac Plus was the first one with SIMMs; four slots, you had to put SIMMs in in pairs (they were 8 bits wide, and the Mac had a 16-bit data bus), and you could put in 256K or 1Mbit SIMMs.
I have, in my attic, an Apple II computer with a little over a Meg of RAM (1 MB RamWorks card, plus 64K on the motherboard, and another 64K buffer on the printer card), and a Mac Plus with 2.5 Mb of RAM. I should plug them in and see if they still work...
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.
Inconceivable!!
Best death? What, die from a naked lady avalanche?
What amazes me is that the catalog is more "sincere" that modern ones.
Look at the footnotes, most of them are trademark acknowledgements (like "CP/M is trademark of the Digital Research Corporation"). Basically you get what you see.
Computers these days are really sold as black boxes, without specifications anywhere and with all kinds of hidden "features" (as in DRMed CDs).
Today, the footnotes would say something like "This device is not sold, it is licensed. Requires windows. Interface is proprietary and protected by DMCA. You agree to give us your soul by using the Product" in 1pt font in a hidden corner.
GPG 0x1B479C78
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