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I wish I had more time to thumb through this whole magazine page by page. Some interesting things I noticed in the first 100 pages or so: A Microsoft CP/M Z80 b
by geocrasher 7y ago
I wish I had more time to thumb through this whole magazine page by page. Some interesting things I noticed in the first 100 pages or so: A Microsoft CP/M Z80 board for the Apple II; A 5.25" Floppy drive: A BARGAIN at $479 (About $1300 in today's currency) and a full 2 page CompuServe advertisement which included pictures of their data center, complete with major Big Iron.
- rb808 7y agoYeah I noticed CompuServe was just $5/hr, plus your call charges I guess.
- ghaff 7y agoSo something like $10-$15/hr in current currency. And, yeah, depending on if it were a local call, phone charges could add to that considerably. You tended to use scripts and programs to download, work offline, and then upload.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- StanislavPetrov 7y agoIn the mid 80s Compuserve used to cost $6/hr at 300 baud but they would charge you $12 if you connected at 1200 baud.
- ghaff 7y agoI didn't remember the exact numbers but, yeah, you connected at slow speed if you were going to do something interactive like chat and "high" speed if you were just going to download/upload and disconnect.
- philiplu 7y agoSure, but they’ve got the Colossal Cave Adventure game on there, and there’s always one more twisty little passage to explore, and before you know it, you’ve blown through $100 in connect charges, even though you’re a poor college student. Not that I’d know anything about that, I swear! I miss the 80s, too. Such a great time to get in on the ground floor of the technology wave. And spend money I couldn’t afford to spend.
- WalterBright 7y ago> Such a great time to get in on the ground floor of the technology wave. I coulda been a billionaire if I'd done things slightly differently!
- jacquesm 7y agoThere must be quite a few people on HN for who that holds.
- WalterBright 7y agoYup. I was hardly unique in utterly failing to recognize opportunity.
- Koshkin 7y agoBeing Bill Gates, John Carmack or Steve Jobs is not “doing things slightly differently.”
- WalterBright 7y agoIn the 70's, I worked for a small company that made custom single board computers for various customers. In doing so, we had developed all kinds of software for our own use, like assemblers, linkers, debuggers, etc. All first class stuff. I even designed, built, and programmed video drivers for monitors. We had EVERYTHING needed to build an Apple II. Everything except being able to see what was right in front of our face. One of the other employees (Hal Finney, you might have heard of him) wrote a BASIC interpreter that fit in a 2K PROM. We did nothing with it. Never occurred to us that it was worth anything. So what do I do? I go into the compiler business, which paid well, but had zero prospects of big money :-)
- WalterBright 7y agoJohn Carmack is special. He's a programmer's programmer. He did so much I never could have done. I never think "I coulda written DOOM!" But BASIC, DOS, etc., were fairly straightforward. The magic there was recognizing the opportunity. Maybe I would have failed to execute that properly that as a businessman, who knows, but failing to see the opportunity was where things went into the ditch. Note that Jobs took a while to learn how to run a business. The Apple II made so much money it gave him runway to learn.
- JKCalhoun 7y agoProgram listings the magazine. DIY hardware articles.... I want to live in the 80's again.
- mixmastamyk 7y agoYep, was just reminded of the Heath kit. Always wanted to try but never had the chance.
- WalterBright 7y agoI had an H11. Stupid me sold it.
- ghaff 7y agoAt one point, the editor-in-chief of PC Mag coined something that came to be called "Machrone's Law" that the computer you wanted always cost $5,000 dollars (in then current dollars). This is clearly still possible and more--vis-a-vis the latest Mac Pro. But it used to be very possible to spend something like $10K in today's money to but a pretty basic PC.
- ido 7y agoDepends on what you define as basic, but that price point was always the absolute top of the high end for PCs (albeit not for e.g. UNIX workstations). In my first job (in 2001) some expensive piece of equipment was controlled by a compaq deskpro 386 with a proprietary ISA card + some hardware dongle that only worked on old computers running DOS (wouldn't work on Win9x DOS). My boss at the time told me they spent $10k on that computer alone when they bought it in the 80s but that replacing the equipment it was controlling would cost upwards of a million $, so we had to keep that old PC alive.
- ghaff 7y agoI'm mostly talking quite a while before that. When I bought my first IBM PC clone in the early 80s, it was probably $3K or something like that and it didn't even have a hard drive. (I bought a 5MB hard drive with company money around the same time and it was $5K all by itself.)
- Gibbon1 7y agoI think the general idea was right, except I would put the price at $2500-3000 as the sweet spot. Back then if you spent $5000 on a system you'd be able to buy it for 2/3 that price in six months to a year. Anything less than $1500-2000 was near obsolete.