Cost of a 128KB computer with floppies in 1985
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
Also, these PCs back then were heavy (=>much more resource intensive), handbuilt and low-volume. All things that add a lot to the price.
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.
eh. Money is worth a third of what it was worth.
Adjusted for inflation, I'm pretty sure that today's PCs are still cheaper than this.
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
Well, actually this went from funny to tragic.
The company was called Need to Know, and it was initially in an old Victorian under a freeway overpass in San Francisco.
So I got the computer Friday and ran into this 23 line fail that evening. I called around 8:00 pm, expecting to get an answering machine. Instead I got, " Hey come on over!"
So I drive back to SF and get there around 9:00 pm. Somebody immediately puts a drink in my hand. People are just partying in a low key way. There are computer parts all over the place, but people are just partying.
So one of the guys took my machine apart, diagnosed the CPU failure, and replaced it with parts on hand.
I'm back in Berkeley by maybe 11:00 pm with a fully functional computer.
Here's where it gets ugly. I did business with them into the late 1980s. During that time , some psycho took on a grudge against them and literally burned their place of business down.
Several places of businesses, burned down sequentially. Fucking tragic.
I lost track of them by 1990. I don't know if they went further underground or what.
But they gave me a really human intro to computing. I can only hope they are well , wherever they are.
That's a great story. Thank you for sharing.
I wish I knew what happened. It still bothers me.
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!
So true! My parents got me the C64 when I had no idea about computers. I loved the Spectrum+ my buddy had at the time but always wanted the C128 another friend of mine got. My parents eventually upgraded my computer to an Amstrad CPC6128 when they saw that I was actually programming in BASIC. I learned a lot from that computer too, e.g. Fortran, Pascal, a bit of Z80 assemly (the last one was horrible!)
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).
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.
Today, you can buy microcontrollers with this much RAM + Flash-ROM for like $5 USD. No joke.
https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/microchip-technology/ATSAM4N8BA-MU/4162590
These modern $5 microchips probably have more features people care about too. Also they go like 100MHz on 3V and like 50mA (or less) of current. Or ~150mW of power or so and are therefore suitable to be run off of AA batteries.
The conversion is wrong. £1500 in 1985 is £5814.92($7,359.45) today.
I just googled the conversion of the price from 1985 to today based on inflation and then googled the exchange rate between the current value in GBP to USD.
Who remembers the Sinclair ZX-80 with a massive 1kb ram?!
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!!
Possibly the worst keyboard ever too.
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.
We actually had one of those Macintosh 128 K machines in the lower left. My dad got two external floppy drives for it. The first lesson I remember learning, that I still remember is when the dialog box asks:
{Disk Read Error, [Abort][Retry][Initialize]?}
Initialize is Never ever ever the correct option.
Assuming "Initialize" reformatted the disk and preped it to be used fresh?
Correct, and that could be very problematic depending on the disc I had grabbed
i'm surprised nobody is mentioning that the keyboards in these were masterpieces that are so valuable today.
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.
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.
My dad got the Apple ]|[ (3) he even got a whopping external 1 MB HDD for the thing. The HDD was in the same case as the CPU, so it kinda looked like my dad had two computers sitting next to each other with the monitor straddling them
Someone donated one of those to my elementary school, but we had not software for it, just an Apple II emulator that had to be loaded on the floppy drive before loading whatever other software you wanted to run on it. Sort of pointless. I'm not sure why it was donated without software other than an emulator.
My grandfather's glorious Olivetti proudest pc-1,paid 11million lirae (about 6.000€ euros) with an 8mhz CPU and well over 512kB of ram!
(from Wikipedia, the house burned down in 2001)
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"!!
We had a PCjr. Default was 64k, but we got the 64k sidecar add on for a whopping 128 kb of RAM. We also got a Hayes Smartmodem 1200 with the aluminum case and red LEDs that I still have, because it's amazing even though it's useless. Dad would use it to connect to Compuserv.
We never had the Chiclet keyboard, though - I think they were on to regular keyboards by the time we bought ours.
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
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.
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).
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.
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
I remember my dad paying $800 for 8 megabytes of RAM.
Shit was expensive back then
8 megabytes? I remember upgrading my Apple IIe with a 64k expansion card which allowed for 80 columns of text characters.
It was at least $125.
I was quoted £450 for 16MB in 1993. Approximately double that now with inflation. I was a 15 year old with a part time paper route, no way I'd ever afford that!
Those are antiques now so the might cost a lot as well
It's crazy how Computers have changed over the years !
I guess people who have used PC's from the old era would be able to appreciate the current Computers in a completely different level.
When I remember back to the early 80s, me a single digit aged human with my first Commodore 64 and a cassette tape drive, to being a high school aged kid and helping my buddies install their extended memory set chip by chip to get them to 1mb of ram, to way in the future where I type this comment on a mobile phone touch screen capable of unfathomable high resolution graphics and speed is still a surreal feeling.
I grew up and grew old with computers and it’s wild to imagine a life without and a world without them nearly 50 years later.
A computer with a spreadsheet was a HUGE game changer.
In '85 most companies did books by hand and adding machine. Records were kept in ledgers and in filing cabinets. People used to hire CPA's to come in and do the balancing even in small convenience stores. Given labor wasn't what it is now, but a machine like that could pay for itself pretty quickly.
I worked a fast food job in the 90's They had an ancient box running 1-2-3. Every night, the MOD would have to sit down with a paper sheet and an adding machine to generate this table, then enter all the transformed data into Lotus. They literally sat back there for hours working over the data. I asked, why don't you just change the sheet to do all the calculations? Can't, the franchise owner wants it all done by hand. They were literally taking a row of numbers, doing some math on it, then doing more math on each column to come up with a final row of like 7 numbers.
I had them show me what they were doing and wrote a program on my TI calculator to generate the table from the input numbers. Told them if they wanted the program just to get the same calculator and I'd transfer it over.
Nobody trusted computers.. they were 'new'. It wasn't entirely unheard of for people to verify the output of a computer by hand, or as in your case, doing it by hand intentionally.
Never mind computers (my first one, in I think 1985, had two floppy drives and an amber screen, very fancy), it's phones that blow my mind. I grew up with a heavy black bakelite dial phone that lived on a special bench in the hall, and now I do video calls with my family on the other side of the world from wherever I happen to be. Toll calls used to be a huge deal, you had to call the operator, we didn't even have direct dialling. I watch TV on my phone, not even Star Trek had that!
The old computers from my childhood still boots faster than any modern OS 😎
Was Olivetti any good at that time?
Psh, $5700 and they don't even come with a 4090.
Seriously, though, it's no wonder why businesses had most of computers in the 80s; these companies were ripping people the hell off and getting away with it. Nearly $6 grand and you don't even get a hard drive, nor a reasonable amount of RAM. Give me a fucking break.
I used 3 of those. That Compaq was about as “portable” as a suitcase stuffed with a corpse. Great machine though when you needed it!
I miss the green and black screen though.