On 15 Nov 2000, Iggy Drougge wrote:
> I never thought I'd drool over an old PC...
Me neither... but now, since you've admitted to that, I'll admit that
I once drooled over an IBM PC-AT (stopped drooling when I added one to
my collection a couple of years ago). Back around 1985, still in
college, I used (wasted?) some savings to purchase a genuine IBM
PC-XT, with a 10 MB (ST-513, IIRC) hard drive, monochrome (not even
Hercules) display and 256K of RAM and no math co-processer (I added
one later so that I could install FORTRAN software)... US$2,895, from
Computerland (can you say "con artists" and "clueless computer
buyer"?) ... and regretted that I hadn't spent a little more and
gotten an AT which was a more impressive looking machine... only
afterwards, when I wanted to play with multitasking and began
experimenting with things like C-task, VMiX, Wendin-DOS, Modula-2
coroutines, etc. did I discover that these weren't really useful
computers. :-(
Interestingly, that PC-XT cost about US$2,000 more than I'd paid for
my car a few years earlier, but I'm still driving that car daily (why
waste money on a new car?), and that PC-XT is now rarely used.
There's a valuable lesson to be learnt from this: never spend much
more money on a computer than you'd spend to purchase a 10 year old
car, and never spend more money on a car than the average personal
computer costs.
-RDD
--
Copyright (C) 2000 R. D. Davis "The best way to gain a true understanding of
All Rights Reserved Wile E. Coyote on the Roadrunner cartoons is to
rdd_at_perqlogic.com 410-744-4900 fly, head-first, off a horse into something like
http://www.perqlogic.com/rdd a fence or a tree; trust me, this works." --RDD
Received on Tue Nov 14 2000 - 23:05:40 GMT