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A Look Back At Expensive System Launches
As the launch for the Xbox 360 approaches, with incredibly expensive bundles up for offer, Joystiq takes a look back at expensive system launches of the past. From the article: "Commodore 64 - $1207.04 (originally valued at $595 in 1982) Despite being the most popular computer model of all time, selling between 17 and 25 million units, the Commodore 64 was a relatively expensive games machine by today's standards. However, it offered extremely good value for money by offering unprecedented sound and graphics quality."
How can anybody write about expensive video game systems and NOT mention the Neo Geo. In the early 90's, that sucker had *games* selling in the multiple of hundreds of dollars. It was the king of the hill in terms of $$$s (until the 360 came along)
And also, I don't think its fair to compare a video game console with full blown computers from the past.
These pretzels are making me thirsty.
A much better comparison would be the Vic-20 by Commodore.
The C64 was a home computer; the VIC-20 was a console computer. It was primarily used to play games, although it did have word-processing capability (though limited to 22 chars per line), etc. Its display was typically a TV, and IIRC, it came with a joystick.
Price at retail launch (Jan 1981) was $299, which is approximately $610 in today's dollars, making it about the same as the Xbox 360.
Of course, GTA4 in ANSI just doesn't seem as appealing.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Paparback books have gone up in price 3x since I was a kid (I started buying them around 1988, if I recall they were roughly $2.50). Of course, a few years before they had been half that price.
I had an Atari 800XL.
Of the list you mentioned, The 800XL had:
joystick ports, cartridge port, sprites (p/m graphics), 4 sound channels, plugged into a TV, 320x240 8 bit (sort-of) color.
Yet, that aside, I would consider the 800XL a computer. The 5200 (which was internally very much the same) was a game console.
The difference. The 5200 really couldn't be used for much else (I suppose it could have if somebody really wanted to hack it) whereas the 800 series computers were very adept at it.
Let's look at that list again.
- joystick ports
Yep, could be joysticks. But I also had a sound digitizer that plugged into it as well as a drawing tablet. There were other hardware bits that could plug in (like a realtime clock, which these systems lacked)
- cartridge port
I had games on cartridge, but I also had a programming language (logo) as well as an art program (AtariArtist) which used the aforementioned drawing tablet. It was really for things that could be loaded instantly instead of waiting for IO times. In addition, since storage was limited on these systems, it worked well for applications UNLIKE GAMES where you would need additional disk access so that you didn't have to juggle floppies after loading the app.
- sprites (p/m graphics)
Primarily good for games, but also used for other things. (Like the cursor in AtariArtist, etc)
- 4 sound channels
Not utilized much outside of games, but there were processing tools for audio (music composition, etc.) which used it.
- plugged into a TV
Primarily to keep costs down. This made it affordable to the home user.
- 320x240 8 bit (sort-of) color
The Atari had an 8 bit color palette, but it had different graphics modes that determined how many of those could be on screen at once. The most popular mode would have been mode 7+16 (IIRC) which would have been 4 colors (more if you do a display list interrupt).
Games used the graphics a lot (of course) but it was also used in my word processor (full page previews drawn to approximate page layout) as well as in the art programs available.
So all in all, it really depended on how you used it. Just because it shared commonalities with games machines doesn't mean it wasn't a 'real' computer.
he FTC classify "Switch and Bait" as refusing to sell you something that is available in the Ad. What the stores can do is have only 1 xbox360 core, and have it purposely sold out.
They can legally then say they ran out of supplies and sucker you into paying for the expensive bundle.
No, they can't. A store has to have a "reasonable quantity" of stock on hand for any advertised product. Reasonable quantity is defined as a quantity expected to meet demand.
You cannot have 1 unit of something on hand, advertise that, sell out of it and then switch customers to a higher priced unit. That is bait and switch, as defined by law. The loophole you described does not exist.
What a store can do is be honest about it in advance. If they want to have a limited quantity of something available and advertise it, they can say "LIMITED QUANTITY AVAILABLE!" Stores do this all the time. But that doesn't excuse a store from the "reasonable" quantity requirement, i.e. "limited" does not mean "one unit". It just means they will probably have less stock than they would normally need. Yes, this is somewhat subjective and arbitrary, but a lot of law is based on common sense. If you're going to advertise something and you have only one unit in stock, it is pretty obvious what you're trying to do.
Stores in New York have been busted for this sort of thing many times - I'm sure it's happened elsewhere as well, but I obviously mainly hear about it in my local area.
I believe his point was that the XBox is essentially an x86-based computer, based on an architecture originally known as "IBM compatible", now commonly described as a "PC", and differentiated from machine architectures commonly described as "Macs", "mainframes" "Sparc boxen", etc.
Yeah, other machine types make perfectly usable general-purpose boxes, after some tweaking. That doesn't change the fact that in todays world, people call x86 machines "PCs".
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