Posted on 01/18/2017 2:54:47 PM PST by Rebelbase
My brain stumbled back to the old days. Remember these? Countless hours going through the pages trying to find the best deal. And stacks of the things taking up space on the desk!
Jesus, I remember those things being as thick as the white pages at one point! Just pages of nerd dreams. Back when I could not imagine that one day they would actually cost under 2000 dollars.
Computer Shopper, killed by computer shopping!
It was like the Sears catalog.
There was an outfit called DAK that used a lot of hyperbole in their ads. The one that still tickles me was a 286 with “Blazing 12 MHz”.
I too, remember reading EVERY page and daydreaming about a new machine.
5 MB hard drive, 120kb disks, 12 minutes of tape running to load a program into a 64kb computer...
My watch has more memory and processing power (and connectivity) than my first 4 computers combined.
Lol, I remember those guys!
I’m reminded of going to computer shows.
Absolutely - read it religiously. :)
I see that I can use my Master-Charge card to pay for the TRS-80
Small, black, limited memory....wait, are you talking about a computer or Ebola?
Reminds me of Shotgun News....
...good times
We had a cable technician out here a few days ago, replacing a bad connection that we felt was outside to their setup. Tech wouldn't admit it, and replaced our modem, splitters, and remote which was fine with us. We get combined phone, Internet and TV from them.
Anyway, we are one of the few who still have a telephone land line (and a couple rotary phones for the heck of it). Tech mentioned that if we ever discontinue it, they're ordered to only do new installs of digital phone land lines if ever we wanted to reconnect. Which means no more rotary, or analog phones. The reason we like analog, is if power goes out then the phone land line still works (especially true of rotary). If power goes out with digital phones, no can work.
If you can find a rotary phone, you should grab it. It will work regardless of the state of the power grid.
Yes, I certainly do remember going through issues of Creative Computing and Byte, doing things like poring over the BASIC source code for "Original Adventure" with fascination, and playing that, Zork, Wizardry, and "Castle Wolfenstein" on my Apple II. I can also recall word processing with Screenwriter 2 (70 columns!) and working on VisiCalc spreadsheets!
I bought my Apple ][ Plus instead of my first car. I went deluxe for the time: 64K of RAM (including the 16K Microsoft expansion card), and not one, but two 150K Apple Floppy Drives! I booted into Apple DOS didn't have to stoop to slowly loading software from cassette tapes.
The whole kit and kaboodle set me back about $1799. When I did finally buy my first car, I had a friend who owned a Chevy dealership and he hooked me up with a beige 1970 Chevelle, rusted out below the rear window like they all were. Alas, it only had the 307, not the 350.
Before I started ICS at Georgia Tech in 1983, I sold that Chevelle for $750. Wish I'd held on to it!
The Apple ][+ finally found its way into a church rummage sale, I guess. The next generation of computer geeks had their Apple ][c's, Mac's, and XT's and AT's.
Ah, to be young again...
60 Mb?
I just looked up a 20 minute animated cartoon on my fire: 93Mb.
I just put a 30Gb expansion card in my fire: micro SD- the size of a matchhead.
It cost $28.00
I don’t think anybody would’ve predicted the way cheap memory has proliferated.
CC
What I find amazing is all the billions of dollars spent on that equipment and now you couldn’t give it away.
“If you can find a rotary phone, you should grab it. It will work regardless of the state of the power grid.”
That might be, but it would only work with active phone service, right? We have no home phones at all anymore. We just have cell phones.
I know, we used to pay $3-5/MB for a rotating hard drive, and I just bought a 256,000MB (or $750,000 worth) thumb drive for $40 at Costco. Amazing.
No, Al Sharpton!!! :)
But Ebola is a close second.
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