"Bill McKee" wrote in message
ink.net...

"John Gaquin" wrote in message
...

"Harry Krause" wrote in message

I remember when I bought my first IBM PC, in 83 or 84. It came with one
floppy drive, and a second floppy was $300. Sheesh. No hard drive in
that first unit, but you could get a TAPE drive.

Yup.... I recall our first in 82. Sprang for the extra floppy; also
sprang for additional memory (512K), a color monitor (extra $300, iirc)
so my little girl might be more interested. All that and a wide-carriage
d/m printer, and the tab topped out just under $5K. A couple of years
later, a guy I was building houses with bought an XT ........ with a
built-in hard drive of -- ready? -- 5 megabytes!!!! Brave New World!!!
Overwhelming technology run rampant!!!


First system I bought for the company I worked for at the time (we
designed disk subsystems for the DEC and Data General market). $4400.
512k memory, could not get the full 640K in the early 80's. 8" floppy.
Hard drive was separate from the controller card. My boss at the time
went to Quantum and designed the first fully integrated disk drive. The
"Hard Card". Internal disk controller to the drive. Latest system was an
on sale Compaq with 80GB drive, 256mb memory, memory card reader built in
and 8 USB ports, 2.5ghz. $450. No monitor.


I worked on Mainframes for NCR Corp while going through university. 20k of
memory and $200k with tape drives and random mag card readers, with punch
card / tape I/O and an all uppercase printer. When I went to work for a
company making an IBM Mainframe clone 303x model 8 meg of memory was
enormous.