4 ms·

PCs sure didn't seem particularly cheap "back then"; at least, not for my "back then". $2300 in 1993 money for a 486/dx33 is over $4100 in today's money. I jus

• zwieback 7y ago
  True, cheap is relative in this context. I was easily able to afford a generic 286 as a college student but not a state of the art PC.
• jandrese 7y ago
  IMHO early cheap PCs were machines like the Commodore 64, Apple IIe, and the like. You could do business on those machines, with some limitations. We had a word processor on the Commodore 64 that through some black magic even managed to have a spellchecker. The big downside was that our 9 pin dot matrix printer couldn't print descenders so characters like g j and y were pushed up a couple of points. I'm sure there are people on this board who can tell you about industrial equipment controlled via a dongle hanging off of the cartridge port on a C=64.
  • zwieback 7y ago
    One of our early automated tools on the inkjet cartridge assembly line was controlled by a hp calculator that had an expansion slot. I think the app that opened and closed valves and actuators was written in BASIC. The workmanship of those things was at least as good as some modern PLCs.
  • zozbot234 7y ago
    These were home computers, not PC's. Basically glorified desk calculators, though the multimedia capabilities were impressive for the time and some office work could be done on them. The industrial control jobs you mention would be well within Arduino territory today. And even those were not "cheap" at all in modern terms; the cheapest would cost around $500 or so in today's money.