"John Gaquin" wrote in message
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"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.