On Tue, 26 Jan 1999, Dave Dameron wrote:
> At 12:51 AM 1/27/99 -0500, Bill wrote:
>
> >A lot of people want the latest PC, too. And prices on PC's are
> >generally higher; doesn't that indicate greater desirability?
> >Even to people on this list, how many can honestly say that the
> >most expensive computer that they own, as measured in the price
> >that they actually paid, was not a PC or Mac? (I can, but I
> >strongly suspect I'm an exception.)
> >
> I would guess most on this list can. At least those who, for example, bought a
> computer in the 1970's. I think my Heath H-19 was about US $600 back when
> they were new. I remember dot-matrix printers for $1600. Now add the cost
> of a S-100 system to go with it... (My PC was free, a hand me down)
> Am sure Apples were also in that price range, as well as TRS-80's (with
> disks, printers, etc.) and then I could only look at pictures of a PDP-11.
I know damned well that my first TRS-80 at $599 in 1978 was a much
bigger percentage of my annual income than my wife's casual purchase
of a 333Mhz P-II with the standard trimmings from home shopping
about 6 months back. (Technically, she's got more computer than
have, twice the clock, twice the RAM, four times the root disk of my
main machine, she uses the Winmodem to access AOL -- her sole use
for the machine; aside from the Winmodem it'd be a dynamite Linux
bix, but I have to wait until she sees something cuter on QVC).
That TRS-80 had _no_ peripherals aside from a (crappy) cassette
tape machine. The $300 or so it took to upgrade it to 16k RAM and
Microsoft BASIC was non-trivial.
--
Ward Griffiths
"the timid die just like the daring; and if you don't take the plunge then
you'll just take the fall" Michael Longcor
Received on Wed Jan 27 1999 - 02:05:47 GMT