How much would you pay for a PC with 128KB RAM, and no hard disk?
In today’s money (inflation adjusted)
This an ad from Personal Computer World (UK) from 1985
So everything is about right. Today you can buy a budget pc, and skim on performance, but back then (and I was there man!) you could not.
In 1985 HDD were only starting to gain traction for PC’s and that was about the only thing you could spec up. That IBM pc is “High Res” which probably means it was VGA multicolour (yay!lol) with 640x480 resolution. So you were basically buying top of the line.
Today, if you were to build a top of the line PC, RTX4090, latest best intel cpu, PSU, etc, etc it would be easy to spend $5K!
But damn, the difference in performance from back then to now!! (That IBM is an XT which means it was a 4.77Mhz with 8086 cpu. Just looking at that picture, I can feel the weight of the bloody thing)
I was there too but vga was not. My dad got an IBM XT fully specd as a home computer (he was CFO of Emma EDB). I believe the hires could be EGA or probably Hercules as they don’t brag about colours - but his had CGA. The full spec of my dads pc - that changed my life - was: 2x256kb ram on full length isa cards. 10mb hdd, 360kb floppy. 9pin printer and cga. Total cost back then in Norwegian KR was 120000.
After checking with my dad the price was half of what I stated. He got one for home and one for office - the business he was with was providing IBM mainframes, and wanted to check out the PC. My dad got them because of Lotus 1-2-3 - spreadsheets was the shit in accounting/ finance already
Might be right, could have been ega. It was a long time ago and the mind is wobbly.
yea 8086 couldn’t drive a vga. 16 preset ugly colors if you’re lucky. unless you had a magical amiga with dedicated graphics chips to do 256 colors, 4096 if you’re nasty.
Sir, I’ll have you know that I had an IBM PS/2 Model 25 with 256 glorious colors in MCGA. And fuck every developer that didn’t support MCGA, because it dropped down to 4 color CGA if not. No support for EGA.
and i’m sure you learned your valuable lesson :)
Also, these PCs back then were heavy (=>much more resource intensive), handbuilt and low-volume. All things that add a lot to the price.
eh. Money is worth a third of what it was worth.
Today you can buy a budget pc, and skim on performance, but back then (and I was there man!) you could not.
For PCs? Maybe not, but you could get plenty of other types of home computer for reasonably cheap. A Commodore 64 was $150 in 1985, for instance. Just had to stay away from the absolute bleeding edge.
Adjusted for inflation, I’m pretty sure that today’s PCs are still cheaper than this.
Around 1983 I got a Morrow Microdecision with two floppies.
No hard drive or mouse. It did come with COBOL.
It failed after 23 lines of text entry. Turned out the CPU was defective.
People kept asking me, “Dude, what do you need a computer for?”
Serious question: What did you use that computer for? So, did you just learn to write cobol and make your own programs?
I don’t know about the OP, but our first computer was a TRS-80 clone with a tape drive, 16k ram, and stunning 64x16 B&W graphics. Every month dad would drive us to computer club, we’d copy as many games as we could (onto tape), then spend the rest of the month trying to get them to work. Rinse and repeat. It was awesome.
Also typed in basic games from the computer mags which needed lots of debugging. How I learnt to program (before being taught Pascal in high school).
Typing in the games could be both fun and highly frustrating. I had an Apple II and if you fucked up on a line, you probably weren’t going to be able to find it and fix it. There was no debugger and typing LIST would show you the whole thing and you couldn’t scroll up. So if you did it right, it was great. If you messed up somewhere, good luck.
I do have a funny story about the place I got it in San Francisco, of you care to hear it.
So what’s the story man? Come on, some of us are invested already.
Absolutely! Please do continue.
I just used it for writing papers in college.
I had no idea how to use COBOL.
Ok, so it was more like a digital typewriter to you.
Two years later you could get an Amiga 500, with 512KB for £499. They were such a deal when they arrived. I bought a 20MB hard drive, an extra 512KB of RAM, a second floppy drive and a monitor. If I recall correctly that set me back around £1400.
Who remembers the Sinclair ZX-80 with a massive 1kb ram?!
I was starting writing here to correct you that it had 48KB (like the spectrums) but thought to check on wikipedia and… you are right! Oh my goodness! 1kb and called a computer! And was a computer!
I remember they had a space invaders type game for it, written and run IN 1k RAM!! Just amazing.
theres 1K programming demo contests now that would blow your mind. like https://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php?type[]=1k
Ooh! I had a ZX-81 with a 16k ram pack on it (and cassette recorder to save with!) as a kid haha….god I’m old!!
Don’t mind me. Just showing off the Sinclair ZX Spectrum bag I got a couple of weeks ago. I’m nostalgic for 5 minute loading screens that could trigger an epileptic fit!
The 80s were a different time.
Oh that’s amazing!
The 80’s were certainly a different time. Especially when only allowed to access a computer at school for a few minutes in the day (Apple IIe) so all of us could “have a go at the computer in the library”!
I would never have imagined as a kid what it was going to be like today with smartphones and the internet everywhere….
You were lucky! We only had BBC’s in our computer room.
“Only had BBCs”. The best 8-bit computer of their generation? ONLY had a BBC? You have any idea how lucky we were growing up with those amazing machines in the 80s-90s? I owe my whole career to the BBC, with an honorable mention to the ZX Spectrum I had at home.
Even today, they’re still in use.
Shut up and take my money!
I do, wonderful machine. You could get a 16K RAM pack (most did) that made a huge difference. Problem is, if an ant sneezed in the next town over it’d wobble loose and the machine would crash. A dab of Blu-Tac was just the ticket.
The ZX Spectrum came out 2 years later and was far more capable, and reasonably priced.
Possibly the worst keyboard ever too.
This is why the ZX Spectrum was so important, in 1982 it cost £125 for the 16K model (£469 or so now). That’s within the reach of many consumers. Sure, it was laughably simplistic even at launch, but if it wasn’t for the Speccy I wouldn’t be an IT professional today.
My Dragon 32 or 64 (can’t remember which it was) has a lot to answer for too!
Whole bunch of low cost 8-bit machines in that era, the Dragon 32, Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC ranges to name but a few. Of course we must also mention the BBC Micro, was not low cost but every school had one if you grew up in the UK.
We had one in my school in Ireland too (and I think they were common in schools here) but tbh none of the teachers knew how to use it and so we got very little time on it in school.
Fun fact: flipping the switch on the surge protector while someone was working on one of these was absolutely devastating to their work. They would remind you about the incident nearly 40 years later.
Hey, I recognize you from this comment! You flipped that switch so many decades ago, ruining everything I had worked so hard for. I’ll always remember.
Those lost 50KB of work will forever be etched into my mind. Quite literally: the second I get my hands on a 30TB neurolink you bet your goddam ass I’m making a 50KB text file with your name on repeat, so that I’ll always hear your name echo in my thoughts. “u/Kalkaline@programming.dev flipped my surge protector’s switch”, for x in range infinity
Don’t get the Sanyo. It’s a weird “sorta DOS compatible” machine you’ll have a hard time with software and support for.
The Apricot was also exotic, but seemed to have more of an ecosystem.
The conversion is wrong. £1500 in 1985 is £5814.92($7,359.45) today.
Interestingly mac is the only one with a mouse.
Not very surprising considering their inspiration from xerox parc. I bought a mouse in 86 for my dads pc - a 3 button Genius. On PC mouse would not take off until windows was launched - gui was not needed for real business use according to IBM
That mouse was so uncomfortable. It was built like a box, probably designed for a robot hand.
Yep - but it was the only one available in my area of Norway at the time (I got mine for under 500 NOK because the supplier did wrong. As I was just a kid he let it slide and I got to keep it. There was some painting software supplied as well. That guy went on to be one of Norways biggest producers of pc’s - REC computers
Apple was a very different company back then. If they had followed the philosophy they have today, Apple would have been the last company to to introduce a mouse. The idea is that if a new feature becoms industry standard, they won’t apply it until like 5 years later, but make it somehow better than anyone else.
In this context, it would have probably meant not including a keyboard or display at this point. They could have skipped the black+green stage and go straight for color displays while increasing the resolution, size and refresh rate or something.
Waiting 5 years wasn’t really an option back in those days. PCs moved so fast that if you waited 5 years you’d be missing whole use cases.
Now if you wait 5 years, there’s hardly a difference.
We had an Apple II+, IIe and //c. I would inherit each one when my family upgraded. They were around $1300 each I think. The //c might have been more because it was “portable” (you could put it in a suitcase with a 10-pound battery and a weird tiny horizontal screen that wouldn’t work with most software).
My grandparents had a C-64 which they never used. It basically became mine. I think it was $600.
Owned a //c that was all mine, a birthday gift IIRC. I remember that it had a composite output so you could plug it into a TV to play games on a bigger screen that actually had colour. Loved that thing, including the monochrome (green) monitor that neatly sat on top of it. I would spend hours typing in programs from magazines.
deleted by creator
And to add it was the most advanced device compared to the others. Full mouse support, graphical interface, WYSIWYG , it was a true gamechanger.
Had a used one myself and soldered RAM chips on the MB to make it a fat Mac with 4MB RAM . Boot disk system was copied to a RAM disk after boot. Good times
It says it has a “high res monitor”. For having learned to program graphics on this machine, we had to count the pixels to be able to fit our drawings in the screen: 512x342, that’s not a lot of screen real estate. The 640x480 PC screen was a luxury.
And today that’s an icon.
Apricot? So there were 2 pc makers with connection to fruit? Or Macintosh is not yet Apple then?
Macintosh was always Apple. Apricot may have been trying to ride on the coattails of Apple’s popularity (I remember the computers but I’m too lazy to look it up).
I don’t recall apricot and olivetti. But the other I have vague memories especially the Macintosh one. Compaq doesn’t count as it is still existing.
Olivetti originally made typewriters (we used to have one). Never heard of Apricot.
There was some commercial for the Commodore 64 which basically lambasted the IBM PC for being twice as expensive while having the the same 64K memory.
I was, like, “yeah, but nobody ever bought the 64K model of IBM PC. That would have been just ridiculously limited, right? Right? Everyone got memory expansions, surely?”
Well, 64K was the stock configuration, so I’m sure those memory expansions sold like hotcakes. There was even the option for freaking 16K memory. (Now, I’m sure next to nobody bought that.) Even option to getting no floppy drives, because you could always put your glorious BASIC programs on a cassette tape. Like a caveman. (This also sounds like a rare option.)
@umbraroze C64 caveman with datasette drive reporting in o7
The IBM was Expandable to 640k, which Bill famously said “would be enough for anyone”!!
i’m surprised nobody is mentioning that the keyboards in these were masterpieces that are so valuable today.
My father bought a family pc for 1500ish euros (or equal to that amount) vack in… 1990 or something. With a 386 cpu.
It was great. Though im not sure if the inflation is equal, in my country
