On Wed, Nov 07, 2012 at 03:40:16PM +1100, Peter Ross wrote:
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 were a name-brand PC, and an expensive one. and not-entirely-compatible (i worked in a few places that had some, lots of stuff didn't run on them) no-name clones were much cheaper, the price difference was far greater than it is between noname clones and name-brand PCs these days.
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;-)
likely no-one at the time could either. but people (well, businesses) happily bought them, probably for similar reasons to why people happily pay Apple $100 for extra RAM worth maybe an $10-$15.
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)
might have been '83 or '84 rather than '82. I remember taking that PC with me when i moved to Sydney in '85, and i'd had it for quite a while (before moving out of home, and then to at least two share-houses before i moved to sydney).
The first IBM/PC came with 3 OS (PC/DOS, CP/M-86 and UCSD p-System)! I actually did not know that..
i had PC/DOS and CPM/86. craig -- craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au> BOFH excuse #333: A plumber is needed, the network drain is clogged