On Wed, 7 Nov 2012, Craig Sanders wrote:
On Wed, Nov 07, 2012 at 10:33:33AM +1100, Peter Ross wrote: The first "PC" I ever bought was an XT clone in 1982. IIRC it cost about $1500 for 640K RAM and dual 360K floppies, with a hercules graphics card and an amber monitor (the herc card didn't do colour, but the text quality was vastly superior to what a CGA card was capable of).
The prize does not sound right: I found a quote from the 17th April 1986: 1 M24-20M-640 for $5500 Olivetti M24 Computer Bus Converter (?) 640K RAM 20MB RAM 1x320K FDD IBM Keyboard Colour Screen 8087 Maths Co Processor MS-DOS Operating System 1 M24-20M-640 SP for $7000 Olivetti M24 Computer Bus Converter (?) 640K RAM 20MB RAM 1x320K FDD Olivetti Keyboard Colour Screen 8087 Maths Co Processor MS-DOS Operating System I cannot spot the difference.. I don't know why one is a "SP" version and $1500 more expensive. I don't think the keyboard was worth that much;-) Anyway, with 1982 would you have been ahead of time: according to Wikipedia "IBM PC/XT (model 5160)" was released March 29 1983 ("http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer_XT) The first IBM/PC came with 3 OS (PC/DOS, CP/M-86 and UCSD p-System)! I actually did not know that.. 1987 I learnt Intel assembler using CP/M-86 (on an East-German PC-clone, a A7100, with a Soviet copy of an Intel 8086 in it, the K 1810 WM 86, we called the "washing machine" CPU;-) Actually, when we opened few, we always found a Siemens 8086 clone.. so I am not sure whether the K 1810 WM 86 really existed (or was just made up to render the COCOM restrictions useless). The "COCOM" list prevented the export of computer technology into the Communist countries. But still we had a VAX 11-780 at the uni, somehow smuggled from the West. That beast did not fit easily into a car.. I had a book with U880 (East German Z80 clone) and U8000 (Z8000) assembler, and UCSD in it. I learnt Assember and Pascal with it but never used UCSD which was a compiler system producing machine-independent bytecode (a "Pascal VM"). I used Turbo Pascal 3.0 on CP/M instead, since 1985, on an East German SCP 1715 (CP/M on Z80 [U880]). We also had am East-German PDP-11 clone in 1985, the K1630. It was running a RSX-11 clone but a colleague installed Unix on it: MUTOS 1600. But I left for uni just then. The "other" world I touched then were the ESER mainframes copying IBM mainframes. When I started, we just got a first terminal to make programming on the mainframe more interactive - we used punch cards then. The terminal was from Romania and came with a Romanian manual.. the production of devices came from various East European states. At uni we had the VAXes I mentioned, again a K1630, and the electrotechnics department had a UDOS system on a U8000[Zilog 8000] machine, a Unix System 7 clone. I just got access to it when the wall came down - and a year later I had DECs and Suns and HP/UX machines:-) So the East was pretty much busy re-enacting the IT progress in the West, a process of re-engineering and re-inventing and sometimes plain stealing. Real inventions were pretty rare in that area, I think.. Successfully sidetracked;-) Cheers Peter