Posted on 04/19/2016 1:26:22 PM PDT by daniel1212
THE Headstart Technologies Company of Great Neck, L.I., has introduced two new personal computers equipped with CD-ROM drives, becoming the first maker of personal computers to offer low-cost CD-ROM technology to the home, education and small-business markets...
CD-ROM stands for compact disk read only memory, a laser-based system of storing and replaying large amounts of text, graphics or sound on a single five-inch platter. For example, one CD-ROM disk can hold the entire contents of an encyclopedia, or a shelf's worth of other reference books.
For $2,999, Headstart is offering the Headstart III-CD, which differs from the LX-CD in that it has a more powerful 80286 microprocessor, one megabyte of working memory and a pocket-size external 2,400-baud modem.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
http://articles.latimes.com/1986-09-10/business/fi-13177_1_personal-computer
....
I remember seeing my first 386. I couldn’t believe how fast the DIR command scrolled off the screen.
The first IBM clone I bought was a used 386 from a builder. It was bargain at $1500.
I remember having a $5,000 Ohio Scientific computer in the store because it had a 10 meg hard drive. That was 1981. I weighed 6 pounds back then. 6 freaking pounds!!
A 64 gig SD card? That’s a dam lie.
The good ol days! And "illegal operations."
I wonder if that volume had an entry for Moore's Law.
I do keep an eye on the available RAM via an app in the system tray, and reboot Firefox (the biggest user) if needed, but i rarely shut off the PC, just hit Scroll Lock which is configured to put it to sleep. Thank God for tweaks.
Memory Restart( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/memory-restart) shows how much ram FF is using, and enables easy restart to flush memory.
Indeed, even with only a dual core 2.93ghz CPU. I keep an eye on the CPU usage and ram, and as explained above, sometimes reboot Firefox if needed. The Dell 780 has seen a lot of dutie for a old PC you can get for about 100.00, though i hope to see the box with an AMD 6350 (3.9ghz) CPU back in action to the glory of God, which PC is down, maybe bad mobo.
The tabs are pages i frequent or want readily available, plus ones i mean to read, as well as ones i forgot to shut. And i see Firefox (derivatives are good also) as the best for so-called "power users" as no other browser comes close, due to its extensions. I use the
"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -no-remote -pswitch to run multiple profiles, like one for research/posting and another for online shopping etc. Thank God we can do so.
The FR posting form enhancer by FReeper cynwoody (http://cynwoody.googlepages.com/fr_posting_form_enhancer.html) is also helpful here, as is BBCodeXtra.
And SanDisk Cruzer 32GB (16GB x 2) Cruzer Blade USB 2.0 Flash Drive for 10.65
Up till 2005 that is what i used, for free. Even had a device that kept my connection while i answered the phone, and used a hardware modem. It got us by, thank God. Yet Verizon charges 30.00 a month for just 7mbps tops, with no other options. But Comcast is deceptive and more expensive.
I remember an edition of the Bible that would fit on a 3.5'' floppy. But sound and graphics is another story.
And i have thrown away PCs that cost someone hundreds of dollars, though like an old MS 3.1 i had, they would work well for word processing. But not the Internet today.
Now i see Kingston Digital 240GB SSDNow V300 SATA 3 for 65.00, the prices of which are decreasing slower.
For opening that many tabs at once, your computer should flog you for being a sadist !
I remember that system to this day, it was a solid performer. I installed one at Farmland Foods in KC, IIRC, with 4MB of RAM, 4Mbs IBM Token Ring, WD-1007 ESDI controller and a Micropolis 330MB hard drive! Running Netware 3, and it was a screamer. File access on that server was so much faster than the files on their AS400 (of course, the upgrade from Twin-Ax to Token Ring helped too.)
Mark
“You ever do them Tesla coils there hoss?”
I had a friend that built one about 8 feet high. It shot out some seriously scary bolts 5 or 6 feet long. I would not get near it. It would probably fry every computer within 100 yards!
I remember that too, and when they began coming down in price, at about $300, I remember when SCO came out with a new distribution of Unix, available on floppy disk, ct-tape, or cd-dom, and they priced the CD distribution about $300 less than the other 2.
Can you believe that drives that will burn BD-100 (100GB) are now running under $100?
Mark
The first computer I worked on was a DEC PDP-8.
The first computer I owned was an Altos 586, which I bought used in 1986. I was working as a programmer for a database management company, and they used an Altos 2086 (80286 processor.) I bought the Altos 586 from a church for $1000, and it had a 10MHz 8086 processor, 512MB RAM, a 10MB hard drive, and ran Altos Xenix. No graphics, it used serial terminals, and it came with a pair of Altos II terminals (Wyse 60 equiv.) Since I needed to load the Xenix development system on it for work, I replaced the hard drive with a used 20MB drive for another $1000.
http://www.oldcomputers.net/altos-586.html
Mark
And RAM was so tight, especially if you had to load network drivers. Somewhere around here I still have a copy of Quarterdeck QEMM, which would allow you to optimize the memory you had, load drivers into upper memory, and even allow you to map RAM into unused areas of your bios, so you could actually get a bit over 700KB ram available, even with mouse, network, and other device drivers available.
Looking back, it’s hard to believe that there were versions of word processors and spreadsheets that would run in less than 1MB ram, and could be stored on 360KB disk drives!
Mark
Moving from a 300bps acousti-coupler to a 2400bps modem was incredible. And from there to a US Robotics Dual Standard 9600bps, WooHoo!!!
Mark
Memmaker was good, but nowhere near as good as Quarterdeck’s QEMM. MS DOS 6 & QEMM Rocked!
Mark
...And a “Green Card” had nothing to do with immigration! :-)
Mark
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