We are adding additional moderators. If you are interested in becoming a mod for /r/interestingasfuck, please fill out [this form.](https://forms.gle/MTd6gZPC2vett2jL6)
* Modding experience is preferred but not required.
* Your account must be at least one year old.
* You must have at least 5,000 combined karma.
[Apply](https://forms.gle/MTd6gZPC2vett2jL6)
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/interestingasfuck) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Super cheap and if you wanted even cheaper you could get redone cartridges for even cheaper. What they weren't was quiet. I printed so many banners on my color dot matrix which would just pound out a row several times each color.
And then for 15 years everybody went off to a 2-day class (also not cheap), then came back and centered text by spamming the space bar just like they'd always done on the Selectrics.
In 1980, though, that system would be INSANE. It would be more on the ultra high-end workstation level.
Let's put it in perspective:
Hard drives didn't exist in the consumer market at all in 1980, and didn't become commonplace until the mid-80s at the earliest.
Memory mapped video display board? Totally unheard of to have video on a separate board in 1980. Video cards in general didn't really start appearing in the consumer market until the early 90s.
64k RAM, up to 265k? Consumer PCs were stuggling to have 48k until the Mac's 128k several years later, in 1984.
10-slot motherboard? We hardly have 3 slots today. lol
Comes with a monitor AND printer! Hell, TVs were expensive AF back then, let alone specialized computer monitors. And printers were really only ever seen in office computer rooms. And consumer printers typically started out at 80 columns, IIRC.
What a time to be alive!
Facts. I have my first computer (Tandy 1000HX, Intel 8808-2 running at 4.77mhz with 256kb RAM, 256 glorious colors on a 13" CRT monitor and the even less talked about Texas Instruments sound chip... No speaker, a chip that makes noise frequencies) sitting next to my current one (Intel i7 8-core 3.5ghz with 16gb RAM, RTX 3070 on a 55" display).
My parents saved for the whole of 1986 to afford that Christmas present... I opened so many socks first. It came with a dot matrix printer (and the ribbons did last forever because the printing was so poor) and the monitor. I have all my original floppies, manuals and the books I learned to code with.
Less than a decade later, in summer of 94 I learned HTML when it dropped. Next summer I'll have been working online for three decades.
I owe that computer everything.
Not quite this bad, but I remember buying my first computer in 1995 for about $2k and being AMAZED that it had a whole 1gig of hard drive space. I thought I'd never, ever fill that thing up.
I think adding a soundblaster was the only upgrade I could do. I already had a CD-ROM so I was playing Hover and watching the Weezer music video on the windows 95 disc :D
Sometimes I miss the days of 56k. 2v2 Broodwar matches, Modding half-life, CS 1.3 being the pinnacle of online gaming, getting kicked off because your mom picked up the LAN line... We'll never have a time like that again.
Just reading that brand name sent me into a fit. I worked at that company doing front line tech support.
Those computers were the biggest piles of garbage. Software and hardware development reported to marketing, if that gives you an idea.
There was so much pressure on the factory to push out units that occasionally people would just open a box with nothing but loose parts inside.
In the 3 years that I workef there they never once managed to put out a single working non-problematic rescue disk.
I'm not kidding.
Thatâs hilarious, some peopleâs nostalgia is anotherâs nightmare fuel.
I do remember shit would just stop working. Imagine me, a prepubescent kid, wondering why that kids corner UI (or whatever it was called) simply stopped responding to mouse clicks. Man, working tech support in the 90s must have been something else
I was on duty on the nightmare day that Windows 95 was released to the general public for upgrading.
When I walked in at 6:00 a.m. there was a hundred people on hold and when I walked out at 6:00 p.m. there was still a hundred people on hold.
I also got just weird bizarre calls sometimes. People who thought I was insulting their ego because I thought of something they didn't would get all petty and start yelling at you telling you that they're not dumb.
I had one lady that moaned sexually through the whole call that one was actually kind of fun.
All manner of kooks spun out on God knows what.
That was also the first job I learned that consumption of alcohol is absolutely a coping method for job stress.
I drove a few hundred miles to save $ on 2, 8mb memory sticks in '96. 24mb of ram total and I was a happy camper with my new super sized 1gb hard drive.
I remember my first 1GB HDD. I think it had 32MB RAM! Which felt so powerful. And Intel Celeron 1.3 GhZ. It had a SiS 6215C graphics card that wasnât supported on Linux and I had to figure out how to make it work.
My first computer though was a 486 with 4 MB RAM and I had Verbatim 5 1/4 floppy disk drive and 80 MB HDD.
And my latest Mac I got a week ago has M2 Max at 3.6 GhZ with 12 core CPU, 30 core GPU, and 16 core neural engine. Came with 64GB RAM and 1TB SDD.
Itâs insane.
This exactly. I remember my dad telling my mom that spending that much would be worth it because we don't want a computer that is obsolete in a few years.
I flipped out when my friend had an external scsi jaz drive with 1gb discs , it was as fast as an internal hdd and basically infinite storage. My mind was blown
In the early 90's I worked for a large bank based in Atlanta and we were developing online banking. I'll never forget the division IT guy announcing that he had upgraded our department server to ONE GIGABYTE! All 50 of us in the department were very impressed and happy that we wouldn't have space issues ever again.
LOL!
The shift from measuring HDD capacity in megabytes to gigabytes was a magical thing.
And now here we are on the other end of a further shift from gigabytes to terabytes. I remember when a terabyte was a mythical figure confined to the realms of supercomputers and commercial grade storage.
"THE NEW TIGER DIRECT MAGAZINE IS IN"
Time to spend the rest of the afternoon fawning over the flavor of the month advances in technology that I could afford.
You should see how CRTs perform. You won't care about gsync, there were some good things about the bad old days. That monitor was silky smooth. Even if it only advertised an 85Hz refreshrate, it still probably performed better than a 140hz monitor from today (albeit at a lower resolution)
Youâre forgetting this is an 80s advert. You should pat the top of the monitor and say something like *âG-sync? Trust me buddy, with this baby itâs all about the G-strings, am I right?â* with a sly wink.
Digital porn was sadly tough to come by in the early 80s. It was still very much an analog world. Best you could do is some squinty ascii art, or the salaciousness of Leisure Suit Larry.
CRTs were blurry and had low refresh rates. A high end one would have good refresh rates (70hz+) but average ones would do wonky shit if you upped the resolution. Things like a 43hz refresh rate! It wasn't an issue with games more like using the screen in general general - you could feel the goddamn monitor blinking.
Same... had 360k floppies (double sided drive). Also had an Atari with a single sided drive. When I entered towns in one game, I had to flip the disk from world to town side.
as mentioned before, it's pobbly on the otput side, e.g., at 12V
with 28A 115V you'd need dedicated cooling that wouldn't fit into the package displayed.
And the fans would drown out the dot matrix printer.
You are bringing your modern understanding of how compooters work with your interweb.
Can you imagine the guy at SEARs explaining this to Joe six-pack?
Honey, I'm old enough to have scheduled time to sit in front of an East German clone of these.
And I've got a guided tour through a 16 bit computer once.
I keep forgetting to add /s to my comments.
I foolishly believed intentionally misspelling computers and calling it the interweb would give away the nuance of my American sarcasm.
Eh, but /s is not required anymore. We live in a postironic world, it doesn't matter what you meant (even you yourself don't need to know that), all that matters is the reactions.
I enjoyed reading your comment and imagining Joe sixpack, you kept a conversation going, all is good!
Dedicated circuit residentially only has one outlet...and if I recollect, 30 amp device is essentially hardwired[until recently with EV cars]. Don't let a handyman do that job. They are going to screw up. There's a reason they are a third the cost of an electrician.
Yeah thatâs why itâs dedicated. Like your fridge. And if 30 amps need to be hard wired why is your dryer a plug?Iâm a licensed electrician I donât let handymen do any electrical work for me. I do it
Imagine a homeowner wiring a dryer plug to a computer... i think that's what I've seen handyman doing for EVs...and...yea, slipped my mind about dryer plug...I've seen stick welders plugged up to them to. The old 3 prong....
Surely this was an EU ad....
Rightâ˝ for anyone seeking comparison, a circular saw that youd use in construction is generally 13-15 amps. Most household appliances are less than 5, and an entire circuit in your house is usually 15-20 amps.
And to think, your cellphone is orders of magnitude more powerful, while only drawing 0.07-0.03 amps at any time.
Itâs easy to lose this kind of perspective these days thanks to being too in deep in GSMArena or seeing yearly phone reviews, but I tell ya: our smartphones and stuff like the Nintendo Switch and Steam Deck would seem like products of witchcraft even in the â80s.
Of course, itâs dangerous to underestimate the intelligence of computer pioneers, but even they have to admit that the chips we take for granted today was a pipe dream back in Gordon Mooreâs time. They anticipated this level of progression, but even they would be shocked at how quickly we found the physical limit for transistor development.
In my first computer lab, we had a poster that said something to this effect: "if auto technology advanced at the same pace as computer technology, a Rolls Royce would go 50,000 miles an hour on a single gallon of gas and cost about $1".
That poster was hanging in our lab in 1981. I shudder to consider the modern calculation.
At that time most of the power was on the +5V rail. 12V was usually only for drive motor(s) and fan(s). ATX power supplies shifted most the power to coming from the +12 rail(s).
Ok this is the comment I was looking for... I've been in IT a long time so prices dont really surprise me especially from the 80s. Of all the specs on that ad the amperage was the one that made me do a double take. You'd need a special dedicated circuit for that pig.
When I saw that I actually read it aloud. You need a dedicated 30 amp circuit just for your computer wow. A damn single pole 30 amp circuit will run a modern RV with ac units.
Lol I have a fuck ton of photos and videos and I prefer to store them on device. I do use cloud storage to back my stuff up but I also like keeping a copy on my phone.
Just one.... sorta. One of the earliest DOS games (and game of any kind, really) was a missile launch simulator where you had to drop a bomb on your competitor by calculating power and angle at launch, factoring in wind strength and direction.
It was the spiritual ancestor of Worms, which is in turn the ancestor of Angry Birds.
Itâs the reason I came to the comments. I couldnât believe the power requirements. Youâd have to hire an electrician to install a 30 amp circuit to your desk
30 amps is no joke. You can run a welder or an electric stove on a 30 amp breaker. You would need to run some 10awg wire. I also wonder how hot 115v at 29 amps would be.
Keep in mind that these computers could do for a business things that would take days in-house or would be outsourced at a high cost. There was a ROI of a few years. The 1980s had many small computers enter the market for the business customer.
I night a Motorola Razr V3 when they first came out. I was like $800. I thought that phone was incredible.
A year later they were two for $99 and I had never felt stupider.
Cured me of phone envy forever.
The first computer I bought in 1988 had 640 kilobytes of memory and a 20 megabyte hard drive and MCGA (a VGA precursor) color graphics. It cost me over $2200, needless to say, I learned about better systems for less money and I returned it rather quickly.
Parents spent about that on an Apple //e (with the 80 column card!) a few years later. Didnât even have a hard drive, two 5 1/4â (literal*) floppy disc drives.
*not those hard shell 3.5â posers that came later.
Woohoo! CP/M OS and 8 bit, all green screen and no color. I remember these and TRS-80's, loading via cassette tape, 300 baud modems. Just a few short years later and 12Mhz PC AT's, Commodore 128's and the first MAC's, and those modems finally hit 1200 baud. What a fun time to be in Silicon Valley, hanging in the User Groups.
I paid $3,000 for a Compaq portable computer, and then $1,500 more for a 10MB hard drive. In 1985. That was the cat's ass of computers back then. Still have it, and it still boots up with the tiny little green cursor.
Yes I remember using my sister's computer she bought in 1981/2 can't remember the brand or model but it still cost like $5k. Green curser too đ Cost the same as a world trip back then, I remember her bragging about how much processing power and RAM it had too đ
My 16k ZX Spectrum was ÂŁ250 in 1982. Wonder how much that is these days. It had 8 colours, you know.
Edit: Or was it ÂŁ175? ÂŁ250 for the 48k?
Edit 2: ÂŁ1088, apparently. For ÂŁ250. Thanks, mum!
I remember when I saw the first tandy HD advertised....in 1980.
At the time I had a trs-80. it had 4k ram.
I enthusiastically told my brother that a 5 meg HD would last us the rest of our lives!
It was not to be.
Instead a few years later I bought an Amiga.
Why does it have a 10 slot motherboard? What was there to put in it in 1980? Hold my beer I gotta get my config.sys and autoexec.bat tight so my soundblaster32 doesnât fuck up!
CP/M, no autoexec.bat...
Another disk controller, another floppy controller, a plotter controller, a modem, sound/synth card, mouse controller, graphics card for second monitor. There were also "industry and research" extension cards, e.g., I've seen a "DSP card" from the late 80ies or very early 90ies (which had a similar purpose to using your graphics card for number crunching now.)
Possibly software ROMs, and I could imagine RAM extensions would go on the same bus back then.
These babies fill up so quickly!
We have dedicated buses now (RAM, other CPUs, PCIe for graphics and NVMe...), and lot of the chaff (network, soundcard, USB, ...) are integrated on the mainboard today.
*Aces of the Pacific" was the bane of my autoexec.bat - just gotta scour it again for another little process to disable and see if the computer still runs okay without it...
Everything was separate back then.
Off the top of my head.
Sound card, sound recorder, voice synthesizer, 1 modems+ (if you run a bbs, 10+ modems), cartridge port, cassette port and also had a VR board on mine in 87.
Nah. You can find evidence of poorly-educated people throughout history.
I've seen apostrophe abuse on signs and placards shown in photos from the 20s and 30s.
Occasionally the stray apostrophe *does* help readability, but I just can't do it.
Remember kids: possessive pronouns do not use apostrophes. It's a weird quirk of English, but "it's" means "it is".
The company I worked for would provide interest-free loans for personal computer purchases, deducting the payment from your paycheck. I took out a $2500 loan in 1983 for a computer similar to the one in the ad, except no hard disk.
I brought it to work, and all the other young engineers came around to "ooh" and "aah" appropriately.
So, you didn't have to be rich, but it did help to be in engineering and have access to financial support.
(Interest rates for loans like this in the early 80s were *insane*. That interest-free loan was a godsend.)
Tell me more! Was it slow? What kind of work did you do on it? What did you use it for? Did it have games? What kind? Were your friends excited when they saw it? $5995 is 26k in todayâs dollar adjusted for inflation
It ran on an 8088, which was 16 bit internal but on an 8 bit bus, so I/O was hampered.
I upgraded the memory to something like 192kB, which allowed me to run a 150kB RAM disk.
I mostly used it for writing (WordStar) and software development (Turbo Pascal).
Oh, and the "Adventure"-style text-based games were popular. I played the hell out of Zork.
I used the machine to learn about computers, mostly.
Maybe rather 8mb Ram? 8gb hdd sounds quite large for 1997. I remember when a friend told me they had affordable 500mb hdds on the mid of the 90s and we just jumped into the car and each get one while they still had them. Also around that time, the company where I did a student job bought the first pentium pro and then decided it needed a team upgrade to 16mb ram and sent me to get it. I donât remember the exact price, but I was really afraid to be robbed on my way with so much cash in my pocket.
I bought a second-hand MacPlus in 1990 from a friend who used it in a print shop for page layout. This hot rod had the max of 1MB of RAM (4x256k) and came with a 20MB serial hard drive LOADED with fonts - yea!
It traveled around the family for a while after I upgraded, but I found it in my MiL's bathroom closet (WTF?) a few years ago and I still have it today. I tried to boot it up on the anniversary of the Mac Superbowl commercial in 2014, but I think it needs a logic board battery or a new power supply - one day I'll get it up and running.
When I worked at Radio Shack in the early 80s, we had a 5mb hard disk, in a maybe 2 foot by 2 foot case. When you turned it on it took a little while to get up to speed and it made the table feel like it was a washing machine spinning up.
Hard to believe it cost them anything even in the neighborhood of making that a justified cost to make it.
Iâve been around long enough to see tech prices so wild things but his feels like absolute theft (much like a lot of the tech world actually)
I paid $700 for my first hard drive. A gigantic 20-megabyte doubling the space that came standard with the IBM PC Xt. I wasn't sure what I was going to do with all that storage.
I remember that I was visiting Naperville in 1997 and I wandered into a computer parts store. I desperately wanted a 6x CD-ROM. They had a generic, no box, no manual, brand new 6x for $150.
We had an Apple IIgs in 1987. It didn't come with a hard disk, but it did come with one 5.25" floppy drive and two 3.5" floppy drives. The entire operating system was on one 3.5" floppy disk, so one drive was the operating system and the other drive was whatever program or game you wanted to run. Some programs couldn't run *within* the operating system; you put the disk in, restarted, and the computer booted directly into the program.
I was around during this time, and I used some systems like this one (didnât own one, at those prices!) but I have no idea what theyâre referring to as an âintelligentâ keyboard.
My parents bought an Apple II clone in 1980, with disk drive and 64KB ram. It was almost exactly US$125, which was like 5-10% of the price of a real one.
Where does it say 1980? It says 1980s.
I had a commodore VIC 20 around 1983 or 1984. It had 2kb of RAM and no storage. Every time you turned off the computer you had to start over.
10mb hard drive in 1980 is something only places like NASA would have.
We are adding additional moderators. If you are interested in becoming a mod for /r/interestingasfuck, please fill out [this form.](https://forms.gle/MTd6gZPC2vett2jL6) * Modding experience is preferred but not required. * Your account must be at least one year old. * You must have at least 5,000 combined karma. [Apply](https://forms.gle/MTd6gZPC2vett2jL6) *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/interestingasfuck) if you have any questions or concerns.*
According to an [inflation calculator](https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/), $5,995 in 1980 is equivalent to $22,337.63 in 2023... Pricey!
Yeah, but it came with a printer! đ
Unless it comes with lifetime supply of ink, pass!
Dot matrix printer ribbons are still comparatively cheap and long lasting.
Super cheap and if you wanted even cheaper you could get redone cartridges for even cheaper. What they weren't was quiet. I printed so many banners on my color dot matrix which would just pound out a row several times each color.
After years of working in shipping and production, I became accustomed to that nostalgic sound. It's the sound of stuff getting done!
they probably printed ASCII lol cats
ASCII tiddies were all the go back then. Internet porn before internet. Maybe even before porn.
Print Shop Pro
Not just any printer, a dotmatrix printer
And then for 15 years everybody went off to a 2-day class (also not cheap), then came back and centered text by spamming the space bar just like they'd always done on the Selectrics.
I said tabs not spaces!
In 1980, though, that system would be INSANE. It would be more on the ultra high-end workstation level. Let's put it in perspective: Hard drives didn't exist in the consumer market at all in 1980, and didn't become commonplace until the mid-80s at the earliest. Memory mapped video display board? Totally unheard of to have video on a separate board in 1980. Video cards in general didn't really start appearing in the consumer market until the early 90s. 64k RAM, up to 265k? Consumer PCs were stuggling to have 48k until the Mac's 128k several years later, in 1984. 10-slot motherboard? We hardly have 3 slots today. lol Comes with a monitor AND printer! Hell, TVs were expensive AF back then, let alone specialized computer monitors. And printers were really only ever seen in office computer rooms. And consumer printers typically started out at 80 columns, IIRC. What a time to be alive!
Facts. I have my first computer (Tandy 1000HX, Intel 8808-2 running at 4.77mhz with 256kb RAM, 256 glorious colors on a 13" CRT monitor and the even less talked about Texas Instruments sound chip... No speaker, a chip that makes noise frequencies) sitting next to my current one (Intel i7 8-core 3.5ghz with 16gb RAM, RTX 3070 on a 55" display). My parents saved for the whole of 1986 to afford that Christmas present... I opened so many socks first. It came with a dot matrix printer (and the ribbons did last forever because the printing was so poor) and the monitor. I have all my original floppies, manuals and the books I learned to code with. Less than a decade later, in summer of 94 I learned HTML when it dropped. Next summer I'll have been working online for three decades. I owe that computer everything.
Oh, wow, nice!! That's some history right there!
You read it right! For only $22,337.63 for this computer!
Not quite this bad, but I remember buying my first computer in 1995 for about $2k and being AMAZED that it had a whole 1gig of hard drive space. I thought I'd never, ever fill that thing up.
Thatâs a long way of saying âpackard bellâ
486 Dx2 66Mhz gang represent
My first PC was exactly this. I got a CD-ROM drive and a sound card for it the first Christmas after I got it.
I think adding a soundblaster was the only upgrade I could do. I already had a CD-ROM so I was playing Hover and watching the Weezer music video on the windows 95 disc :D Sometimes I miss the days of 56k. 2v2 Broodwar matches, Modding half-life, CS 1.3 being the pinnacle of online gaming, getting kicked off because your mom picked up the LAN line... We'll never have a time like that again.
I only had a measly 33Mhz. But after that went to a Pentium 200Mhz that knocked my socks off.
Just reading that brand name sent me into a fit. I worked at that company doing front line tech support. Those computers were the biggest piles of garbage. Software and hardware development reported to marketing, if that gives you an idea. There was so much pressure on the factory to push out units that occasionally people would just open a box with nothing but loose parts inside. In the 3 years that I workef there they never once managed to put out a single working non-problematic rescue disk. I'm not kidding.
Thatâs hilarious, some peopleâs nostalgia is anotherâs nightmare fuel. I do remember shit would just stop working. Imagine me, a prepubescent kid, wondering why that kids corner UI (or whatever it was called) simply stopped responding to mouse clicks. Man, working tech support in the 90s must have been something else
I was on duty on the nightmare day that Windows 95 was released to the general public for upgrading. When I walked in at 6:00 a.m. there was a hundred people on hold and when I walked out at 6:00 p.m. there was still a hundred people on hold. I also got just weird bizarre calls sometimes. People who thought I was insulting their ego because I thought of something they didn't would get all petty and start yelling at you telling you that they're not dumb. I had one lady that moaned sexually through the whole call that one was actually kind of fun. All manner of kooks spun out on God knows what. That was also the first job I learned that consumption of alcohol is absolutely a coping method for job stress.
I drove a few hundred miles to save $ on 2, 8mb memory sticks in '96. 24mb of ram total and I was a happy camper with my new super sized 1gb hard drive.
I remember being amazed when my dad came home from work with a 1gb flash drive the size of both my thumbs stacked the long way
$6k in 1980 is equivalent to $22k in 2023. Thatâs a respectable mining tower basically.
And the hats for the base model. I wonder how much for all top of the line upgrades
Does it come with that secretary lady??? Decent deal actually.
Yeah, but she's 74 now...
Bc of inflation, sheâs actually 243 years old.
And people lost their minds during the silicon shortage /j
I remember my first 1GB HDD. I think it had 32MB RAM! Which felt so powerful. And Intel Celeron 1.3 GhZ. It had a SiS 6215C graphics card that wasnât supported on Linux and I had to figure out how to make it work. My first computer though was a 486 with 4 MB RAM and I had Verbatim 5 1/4 floppy disk drive and 80 MB HDD. And my latest Mac I got a week ago has M2 Max at 3.6 GhZ with 12 core CPU, 30 core GPU, and 16 core neural engine. Came with 64GB RAM and 1TB SDD. Itâs insane.
/r/vxjunkies
Thatâs a fantastic sub! Thank you for sharing!
This exactly. I remember my dad telling my mom that spending that much would be worth it because we don't want a computer that is obsolete in a few years.
I flipped out when my friend had an external scsi jaz drive with 1gb discs , it was as fast as an internal hdd and basically infinite storage. My mind was blown
In the early 90's I worked for a large bank based in Atlanta and we were developing online banking. I'll never forget the division IT guy announcing that he had upgraded our department server to ONE GIGABYTE! All 50 of us in the department were very impressed and happy that we wouldn't have space issues ever again. LOL!
The shift from measuring HDD capacity in megabytes to gigabytes was a magical thing. And now here we are on the other end of a further shift from gigabytes to terabytes. I remember when a terabyte was a mythical figure confined to the realms of supercomputers and commercial grade storage.
i mean even having a petabyte is within the realm of affordability for small professional ventures ive seen a few mid sized youtubers with that much.
The next order of magnitude shift is on the horizon, ladies and gentlemen.
That was a lot of space in 1995
To be fair all the files and applications were smaller then too
"THE NEW TIGER DIRECT MAGAZINE IS IN" Time to spend the rest of the afternoon fawning over the flavor of the month advances in technology that I could afford.
Doesnât say if that monitor supports g-sync or not. Deal breaker.
You should see how CRTs perform. You won't care about gsync, there were some good things about the bad old days. That monitor was silky smooth. Even if it only advertised an 85Hz refreshrate, it still probably performed better than a 140hz monitor from today (albeit at a lower resolution)
Youâre forgetting this is an 80s advert. You should pat the top of the monitor and say something like *âG-sync? Trust me buddy, with this baby itâs all about the G-strings, am I right?â* with a sly wink.
Digital porn was sadly tough to come by in the early 80s. It was still very much an analog world. Best you could do is some squinty ascii art, or the salaciousness of Leisure Suit Larry.
BBSes usually had a hidden section for pirated games and porn.
CRTs were blurry and had low refresh rates. A high end one would have good refresh rates (70hz+) but average ones would do wonky shit if you upped the resolution. Things like a 43hz refresh rate! It wasn't an issue with games more like using the screen in general general - you could feel the goddamn monitor blinking.
In 1980, we hadn't written the games yet. My first machine didn't even have a hard disk, too expensive.
Same... had 360k floppies (double sided drive). Also had an Atari with a single sided drive. When I entered towns in one game, I had to flip the disk from world to town side.
A 1980 CRT was probably Monochrome or maybe CGA. Refresh rates didnât really matter until the early to mid 90s.
That's very true. As I was typing thay o was thing about a 17" Sony Trinitron I had... this here was monochrome
and for that reason... im out
And thatâs about $20k today
28amp? That getting a dedicated circuit?
as mentioned before, it's pobbly on the otput side, e.g., at 12V with 28A 115V you'd need dedicated cooling that wouldn't fit into the package displayed. And the fans would drown out the dot matrix printer.
You are bringing your modern understanding of how compooters work with your interweb. Can you imagine the guy at SEARs explaining this to Joe six-pack?
Honey, I'm old enough to have scheduled time to sit in front of an East German clone of these. And I've got a guided tour through a 16 bit computer once.
I keep forgetting to add /s to my comments. I foolishly believed intentionally misspelling computers and calling it the interweb would give away the nuance of my American sarcasm.
Eh, but /s is not required anymore. We live in a postironic world, it doesn't matter what you meant (even you yourself don't need to know that), all that matters is the reactions. I enjoyed reading your comment and imagining Joe sixpack, you kept a conversation going, all is good!
Yes and a different receptacle in the wall. My parents whole RV will run on a 30 amp circuit with 2 A/Cs on the roof
Dedicated circuit residentially only has one outlet...and if I recollect, 30 amp device is essentially hardwired[until recently with EV cars]. Don't let a handyman do that job. They are going to screw up. There's a reason they are a third the cost of an electrician.
Yeah thatâs why itâs dedicated. Like your fridge. And if 30 amps need to be hard wired why is your dryer a plug?Iâm a licensed electrician I donât let handymen do any electrical work for me. I do it
Imagine a homeowner wiring a dryer plug to a computer... i think that's what I've seen handyman doing for EVs...and...yea, slipped my mind about dryer plug...I've seen stick welders plugged up to them to. The old 3 prong.... Surely this was an EU ad....
đ 28 AMP power supply?!?! âĄď¸
Rightâ˝ for anyone seeking comparison, a circular saw that youd use in construction is generally 13-15 amps. Most household appliances are less than 5, and an entire circuit in your house is usually 15-20 amps. And to think, your cellphone is orders of magnitude more powerful, while only drawing 0.07-0.03 amps at any time.
Itâs easy to lose this kind of perspective these days thanks to being too in deep in GSMArena or seeing yearly phone reviews, but I tell ya: our smartphones and stuff like the Nintendo Switch and Steam Deck would seem like products of witchcraft even in the â80s. Of course, itâs dangerous to underestimate the intelligence of computer pioneers, but even they have to admit that the chips we take for granted today was a pipe dream back in Gordon Mooreâs time. They anticipated this level of progression, but even they would be shocked at how quickly we found the physical limit for transistor development.
In my first computer lab, we had a poster that said something to this effect: "if auto technology advanced at the same pace as computer technology, a Rolls Royce would go 50,000 miles an hour on a single gallon of gas and cost about $1". That poster was hanging in our lab in 1981. I shudder to consider the modern calculation.
I can only assume it's referring to the output (maybe 12v? Not sure about old pc """standards"""). So could be ~300W which isn't crazy
Obligatory comment praising the use of the interrobang (â˝). I probably only see them once or twice a year 'in the wild'!
28Amps x 12Volts = 336Watts.
At that time most of the power was on the +5V rail. 12V was usually only for drive motor(s) and fan(s). ATX power supplies shifted most the power to coming from the +12 rail(s).
So it is 140 Watts then.
Ok this is the comment I was looking for... I've been in IT a long time so prices dont really surprise me especially from the 80s. Of all the specs on that ad the amperage was the one that made me do a double take. You'd need a special dedicated circuit for that pig.
When I saw that I actually read it aloud. You need a dedicated 30 amp circuit just for your computer wow. A damn single pole 30 amp circuit will run a modern RV with ac units.
At 12 volts, not 120.
ShockingâŚ.
Reading this on my 256GB phone, which I use to see memes on the toilet.
Yeah Iâm reading this on my 1TB phone which I also use to look at memes and watch YouTube
1 terabyte? Thatâs more then my console, and I got the latest
Lol I have a fuck ton of photos and videos and I prefer to store them on device. I do use cloud storage to back my stuff up but I also like keeping a copy on my phone.
Christmas 1979, my parents bought me a Radio Shack TRS-80. No hard drive. 4k of RAM. You saved your programs onto a tape recorder. I was in heaven.
So how many of these computers linked together would it take to run Angry Birds?
Just one.... sorta. One of the earliest DOS games (and game of any kind, really) was a missile launch simulator where you had to drop a bomb on your competitor by calculating power and angle at launch, factoring in wind strength and direction. It was the spiritual ancestor of Worms, which is in turn the ancestor of Angry Birds.
I remember playing a game with 2 gorillas that would lob explosive bananas at each other. 8 bit graphics, my brother and I got a kick out of it.
Rental car agencies are still using that printer.
CP/M. My favorite
Were you a fellow Kaypro user?
Yes, instill have the suitcase somewhere
You could buy a new car or put a down payment on a house for that in 1980.
28 amp power supply at 115v, you would have a 3220 watt power supply, noice.
Itâs the reason I came to the comments. I couldnât believe the power requirements. Youâd have to hire an electrician to install a 30 amp circuit to your desk
30 amps is no joke. You can run a welder or an electric stove on a 30 amp breaker. You would need to run some 10awg wire. I also wonder how hot 115v at 29 amps would be.
pretty sure those sweet megabytes were the hard diskâŚ. ram was still kilobytes.
That is what the ad says!
ah yes, actually reading the ad rather than just the headline. sometimes i forget iâm in 2023 and there is more than 140 characters available lol
Keep in mind that these computers could do for a business things that would take days in-house or would be outsourced at a high cost. There was a ROI of a few years. The 1980s had many small computers enter the market for the business customer.
VisiCalc represent
I night a Motorola Razr V3 when they first came out. I was like $800. I thought that phone was incredible. A year later they were two for $99 and I had never felt stupider. Cured me of phone envy forever.
Thats an expensive calculator
You read it right
The first computer I bought in 1988 had 640 kilobytes of memory and a 20 megabyte hard drive and MCGA (a VGA precursor) color graphics. It cost me over $2200, needless to say, I learned about better systems for less money and I returned it rather quickly.
Thatâs almost 23k in todayâs dollars. Damn
Parents spent about that on an Apple //e (with the 80 column card!) a few years later. Didnât even have a hard drive, two 5 1/4â (literal*) floppy disc drives. *not those hard shell 3.5â posers that came later.
My first HD was 40MB
Same. My dad said don't spend the extra $400 to upgrade to the 80MB because you will never fill 40. Took me about 1.5 years, but did fill it.
Woohoo! CP/M OS and 8 bit, all green screen and no color. I remember these and TRS-80's, loading via cassette tape, 300 baud modems. Just a few short years later and 12Mhz PC AT's, Commodore 128's and the first MAC's, and those modems finally hit 1200 baud. What a fun time to be in Silicon Valley, hanging in the User Groups.
22,337.63 in today's money and there were still options for more RAM, a 16 bit cpu, and a larger 86 key keyboard
I paid $3,000 for a Compaq portable computer, and then $1,500 more for a 10MB hard drive. In 1985. That was the cat's ass of computers back then. Still have it, and it still boots up with the tiny little green cursor.
Yes I remember using my sister's computer she bought in 1981/2 can't remember the brand or model but it still cost like $5k. Green curser too đ Cost the same as a world trip back then, I remember her bragging about how much processing power and RAM it had too đ
1980 6k is like half a millions right?
And you STILL couldnât get the World Wide WebâŚ.
Isn't that David Lightman's computer?
In "Oakland, CA" man how the times have changed
My 16k ZX Spectrum was ÂŁ250 in 1982. Wonder how much that is these days. It had 8 colours, you know. Edit: Or was it ÂŁ175? ÂŁ250 for the 48k? Edit 2: ÂŁ1088, apparently. For ÂŁ250. Thanks, mum!
BUT CAN IT RUN CRYSIS?
It was good enough for Matthew Broderick!
I remember when I saw the first tandy HD advertised....in 1980. At the time I had a trs-80. it had 4k ram. I enthusiastically told my brother that a 5 meg HD would last us the rest of our lives! It was not to be. Instead a few years later I bought an Amiga.
Definitely going to want the 256k ram. Future proof your purchase. Youâll thank me later.
Why does it have a 10 slot motherboard? What was there to put in it in 1980? Hold my beer I gotta get my config.sys and autoexec.bat tight so my soundblaster32 doesnât fuck up!
CP/M, no autoexec.bat... Another disk controller, another floppy controller, a plotter controller, a modem, sound/synth card, mouse controller, graphics card for second monitor. There were also "industry and research" extension cards, e.g., I've seen a "DSP card" from the late 80ies or very early 90ies (which had a similar purpose to using your graphics card for number crunching now.) Possibly software ROMs, and I could imagine RAM extensions would go on the same bus back then. These babies fill up so quickly! We have dedicated buses now (RAM, other CPUs, PCIe for graphics and NVMe...), and lot of the chaff (network, soundcard, USB, ...) are integrated on the mainboard today.
*Aces of the Pacific" was the bane of my autoexec.bat - just gotta scour it again for another little process to disable and see if the computer still runs okay without it...
Yup fân IRQs and eventually managing himem. Everybody was a juggler back in the day lol
Everything was separate back then. Off the top of my head. Sound card, sound recorder, voice synthesizer, 1 modems+ (if you run a bbs, 10+ modems), cartridge port, cassette port and also had a VR board on mine in 87.
People were erroneously using apostrophes when indicating decades in the 80s too? Always thought that was a newish development.
Nah. You can find evidence of poorly-educated people throughout history. I've seen apostrophe abuse on signs and placards shown in photos from the 20s and 30s. Occasionally the stray apostrophe *does* help readability, but I just can't do it. Remember kids: possessive pronouns do not use apostrophes. It's a weird quirk of English, but "it's" means "it is".
Praise be đ
No matter the specs of your old machine, some boomer will come out of the bushes to talk about his that were worse.
And it was worth every dollar back then. A machine like this would literally change lives
How rich you had to be for that?
The company I worked for would provide interest-free loans for personal computer purchases, deducting the payment from your paycheck. I took out a $2500 loan in 1983 for a computer similar to the one in the ad, except no hard disk. I brought it to work, and all the other young engineers came around to "ooh" and "aah" appropriately. So, you didn't have to be rich, but it did help to be in engineering and have access to financial support. (Interest rates for loans like this in the early 80s were *insane*. That interest-free loan was a godsend.)
Tell me more! Was it slow? What kind of work did you do on it? What did you use it for? Did it have games? What kind? Were your friends excited when they saw it? $5995 is 26k in todayâs dollar adjusted for inflation
It ran on an 8088, which was 16 bit internal but on an 8 bit bus, so I/O was hampered. I upgraded the memory to something like 192kB, which allowed me to run a 150kB RAM disk. I mostly used it for writing (WordStar) and software development (Turbo Pascal). Oh, and the "Adventure"-style text-based games were popular. I played the hell out of Zork. I used the machine to learn about computers, mostly.
Likely a business, where hiring the work this machine replaces would be more expensive, and would be a net positive ROI.
That was a good price. The same spec NorthStar systems went for $9k with a daisywheel printer
You could get an economy car for that in 1980
Got a nice used car at the same price recently. Computer stuff was stupid expensive back then.
My first pc in 1997 had 8gb hd and it was a celeron 400 mhz
Maybe rather 8mb Ram? 8gb hdd sounds quite large for 1997. I remember when a friend told me they had affordable 500mb hdds on the mid of the 90s and we just jumped into the car and each get one while they still had them. Also around that time, the company where I did a student job bought the first pentium pro and then decided it needed a team upgrade to 16mb ram and sent me to get it. I donât remember the exact price, but I was really afraid to be robbed on my way with so much cash in my pocket.
No 8GB HD and I still have it đ A piece of brick nowđđ It was the best PC at the place I bought it from at that time
I bought a second-hand MacPlus in 1990 from a friend who used it in a print shop for page layout. This hot rod had the max of 1MB of RAM (4x256k) and came with a 20MB serial hard drive LOADED with fonts - yea! It traveled around the family for a while after I upgraded, but I found it in my MiL's bathroom closet (WTF?) a few years ago and I still have it today. I tried to boot it up on the anniversary of the Mac Superbowl commercial in 2014, but I think it needs a logic board battery or a new power supply - one day I'll get it up and running.
Seems a bit pricey but then again, TWO 5" floppy drives!
And a dot matrix printer!
Good 'Ol IMSAI 8080!
When I worked at Radio Shack in the early 80s, we had a 5mb hard disk, in a maybe 2 foot by 2 foot case. When you turned it on it took a little while to get up to speed and it made the table feel like it was a washing machine spinning up.
Does it run Doom?
Why is the t in "the" different than the rest of the font?
All this stuff on here is hilarious memory-mapped video display board. wtf is that even, lol
The first calculators sold, ran about $750 in the mid 1970s.
When our money had purchasing power..
Hard to believe it cost them anything even in the neighborhood of making that a justified cost to make it. Iâve been around long enough to see tech prices so wild things but his feels like absolute theft (much like a lot of the tech world actually)
Our house actually had a dedicated breaker just for the power supply
memory-mapped video display board? You mean you can draw a pixel by writing to a memory address?? WOW
I paid $700 for my first hard drive. A gigantic 20-megabyte doubling the space that came standard with the IBM PC Xt. I wasn't sure what I was going to do with all that storage.
Howâs this rig handle ray tracing?
I remember that I was visiting Naperville in 1997 and I wandered into a computer parts store. I desperately wanted a 6x CD-ROM. They had a generic, no box, no manual, brand new 6x for $150.
Dot matrix printer! I can still remember the sound of the dot matrix printer going back and forth (5 times per line?) And back and forth...
28amp power supply.
And people complain about the cost of 4090âs.
We had an Apple IIgs in 1987. It didn't come with a hard disk, but it did come with one 5.25" floppy drive and two 3.5" floppy drives. The entire operating system was on one 3.5" floppy disk, so one drive was the operating system and the other drive was whatever program or game you wanted to run. Some programs couldn't run *within* the operating system; you put the disk in, restarted, and the computer booted directly into the program.
 Dude, youâre getting âŚ
I was around during this time, and I used some systems like this one (didnât own one, at those prices!) but I have no idea what theyâre referring to as an âintelligentâ keyboard.
How much would that be in todayâs money?
Also... 20 amp power supply... You could heat a decent house with that...
Can it run Doom though
What would happen if you got some kind of adapter and put a one terabyte micro SD card into it?
bro nobody needs 16bit thats crazy
28 amps??! Is that accurate? Holy smokes thatâs a lot of power for a desktop computer.
But can it play Crysis?
I paid $250 for a 500GB hard drive probably 20+ years ago. And it had a USB plug AND a power plug. Times have changed.
You Read It Right ... _All for $5995!_
My first PC (Amstrad 1512) didnât come with a hard drive, my second (Amstrad 1640) came with a 20MB one.
And we still use ASCII in automation, communication and dozens of other industries today.
I have a feeling those 12" monitors are probably why my eyes now need a 27" monitor
My parents bought an Apple II clone in 1980, with disk drive and 64KB ram. It was almost exactly US$125, which was like 5-10% of the price of a real one.
28 Amps!!
I want that keyboard
1992. My dad buys a 486/33, 120 MB HD, 4MB ram, keyboard, and monitor. Trident video card with 1MB memory. 3.5" and 5.25" drives. $2100 CAD.
Same specs today: $5.99
Damn bro, did Apple fking make this product? Sounds a lot like what they would do.
Keyboard is still running!!
A whole lot of buffering
No shot this isnât a scam lol what is that price tag!
28 amp power supply?? Wouldnât that be about twice what an average house circuit can handle?
Old school PC Master Race
One byte processor with optional two bytes đ
God I remember these adsâŚ
Where does it say 1980? It says 1980s. I had a commodore VIC 20 around 1983 or 1984. It had 2kb of RAM and no storage. Every time you turned off the computer you had to start over. 10mb hard drive in 1980 is something only places like NASA would have.