10 Old Computers With Outrageous Price Tags
Presenting the ugliest computers from the past that came with outrageous price tags. Enjoy!
Radio Shack TRS - 80 Model II (1979)
Price : $3,450 (32K RAM)
$3,899 (64 K Ram)
Osborne 1 - Considered to be the first portable computer (1981)
Price : $1,795 (32K RAM)
Otrona Attache (1982)
Price : $3,995 (64K RAM)
Apple Lisa (1983)
Price : $9,995 (1MB)
Apple III (1981)
Price : $3,495 (128K RAM)
$3,815 (w/ monitor)
Compaq Portable III (1987)
Price : $4,999 (20MB HD)
$5,799 (40MB HD)
Dynabyte (1981)
Price : $2,375 (64K RAM)
IBM 5120 (1980)
Price : $9,340 (w/ printer)
IBM Portable PC 5155 (1984)
Price : $4,225 (256 - 640K RAM)
IBM Portable PC (1975)
Price : $19,975 (64K RAM)
Which one made you bite your nails? The IBM Portable PC released in 1975 certainly made me piss my pants considering there are houses selling on eBay these days for freaking 10 dollars.
via : OldComputers
120 Rockin' Comments
October 21st, 2008 at 1:37 pm
I wrote software on the $20K IBM during 75 and 76. It ran only these two languages: BASIC and APL. I wrote in APL. The tape drive was a special tape cassette and was virtual random access storage. It would wind back and forth to the right sots at high speed (which meant 2 minutes if it had to go end to end). You’d save programs, workspaces and data on the tape. I also hooked it to an RS-232 port and a non-IBM item called a DTC-MicroFile which had two 8″ floppy drives, which we used for our main storage. Every few minutes the program would say “please insert diskette 143″ or some such. I programmed that system. Awesome, for 1975! And APL was a great language. I miss it.
Here’s the kicker. There was an IBM 370 mainframe inside! I swear, it had a small 370 CPU, all very dense with many circuit boards, ran 370 machine language and microcode, and the two languages were the full mainframe versions of APL and BASIC. And the whole thing came with an IBM technician who did monthly on-site maintenance on the thing. It weighed I think 50-60 pounds and came with a leather carrying case which was like a soft suitcase with a big shoulder strap. State of the Art, baby!
October 21st, 2008 at 2:07 pm
Hey Lipton, thanks for sharing the information. For some reason I feel young
October 21st, 2008 at 5:52 pm
I bought an IBM Portable PC in 1980 with an IBM Graphics Printer. It was only $2500 new. Your $9k figure is way out of line.
October 21st, 2008 at 6:16 pm
You got Apple Lisa and III, but what about every single Mac book pro ever made?
October 21st, 2008 at 8:12 pm
“You got Apple Lisa and III, but what about every single Mac book pro ever made?” - Yeah, cause they had a Macbook Pro in the 70’s and 80’s. I bet you never knew what a Mac was before the iMac or the iPod. You sound like a sheep.
October 21st, 2008 at 9:04 pm
You forgot the commodore 64SX! That was like the coolest computer back in 1984! To me at least!
October 21st, 2008 at 9:04 pm
You’d shell out $1,000 for a nice rig? Are you kidding? Back in 2031, we were getting really nice computers at the convenience store at the gas station in a three-pack for $12.50. Now we just replicate them at a cost of about a dollar each.
Seriously, though… You must be too young to have lived through the early 1980s. Yes, the stuff was expensive, but it was what we had. A lot of the technology was new(ish) and they weren’t producing it in huge quantities. We did a lot with those machines, and it took a lot of ingenuity to figure out how to make them do the tricks we wanted with the computing power and storage available.
I’m going to sound like an old fart saying this (and I’m only 40, but I wrote my first program at 11), but younger folks would do themselves well to learn to develop software in such constrained environments. I got my first job in 1984 writing code in Z-80 assembly for a multitasking BASIC compiler that ran on CP/M systems with a whopping 32K of RAM. On the one hand, it’s great that we no longer have to worry about how precious every byte is. But it does make elegant, compact software something of a lost art to everyone except those who do embedded work. (Hi, Jack!)
–Mark
October 21st, 2008 at 9:11 pm
I used to dream of being a grown-up on a yacht with a c64SX. I would play video games all day! Damn i old!
October 21st, 2008 at 9:51 pm
@Mark From The Future : $1000 = chump change hehehe……and yes I was young in the 80s
October 21st, 2008 at 9:51 pm
i’m assuming these are the actual prices… not factored for inflation…
October 21st, 2008 at 10:05 pm
It’s a little confusing because the description and price is listed below the picture, not above.
October 21st, 2008 at 10:32 pm
These computers are purely silly! have you seen anything so OLD! It looks like jon mccains daughter, sarah palin. WAIT, thats not his daughter?!? Its his Vice President? That is too silly.
Thats how crazy these old computers are.
October 21st, 2008 at 10:32 pm
“You forgot the commodore 64SX! That was like the coolest computer back in 1984!”
less buggy and no viruses. surfing @ 300 baud Whoo Hoo
Damn Skippy, it still is! I still use mine with an external floppy to run geos on 2 360k floppies, GEOS is still faster and smaller than vista on a current quad core machine
October 21st, 2008 at 10:41 pm
@Steven T : here is a trick : look at the first image and if you dont see any prices or desc. above it then the one under it must be for the first image, right? See….its easy
@FrigginGlorious : Seriously dude, your comment just made my night. Sarah Palin = John McCain’s daughter….LMAO
@rickard : ummmmmmm…WHAT?
October 21st, 2008 at 11:46 pm
All photoshopped obviously. Just like all these comments. All shopped
October 22nd, 2008 at 12:54 am
@Robert : How did you get so smart? You should run for president since you have topped em’ all….
October 22nd, 2008 at 8:17 am
Ugliest? I happen to like the looks of the Lisa, Apple III and the IBM 5100. The Dynabyte is just a black box, so I consider it neutral, neither beautiful nor ugly. To the person who said he bought an IBM Portable in 1980 - Wrong! The first IBM PC didn’t even come out until August 1981 and the Portable was announced in 1984 and shipped in early ‘85. The 9K figure is for the 5120 pictured ABOVE the caption.
October 22nd, 2008 at 10:05 am
Seriously good show. Lost track at how expensive those POS where back then.
@FrigginGlorious : Seriously dude, your comment just made my night. Sarah Palin = John McCain’s daughter….LMAO I laughed my ass off when i realized that the “messiah” is actually married to his ugly inbred sister..LMAO
October 22nd, 2008 at 12:41 pm
lol @ Mark from the future. I was thinking of the same thing.
October 22nd, 2008 at 2:11 pm
I guess the Osborne couldn’t have been the first portable computer in 1981 if IBM had the “Portable PC” in 1975. I guess there are degrees of portability.
October 22nd, 2008 at 6:09 pm
I had my first taste of computers in the early 80’s. TRS-80 Mod I, taught us to program it in basic in my 7th grade math class. I was hooked. Always wanted one after that, mainly the Mod 4 portable. But way too expensive (ended up with a C64 sometime after ‘84). Best part is, I picked up a complete working Mod 4p a year or so ago for $25.
Life is good.
Oh, and I just say, McCain and MiLF myself, always gets a laugh. lol
October 22nd, 2008 at 7:53 pm
sinclair zx80 and zx81. used those when i was young. about the size of a postage stamp compared to these hulks
October 23rd, 2008 at 2:08 am
You also forgot the first laptop, made by Timex. It used a membrane setup for the keyboard, it was an eight bit system and it had 64K of memory.
October 23rd, 2008 at 10:08 am
My pop brought home a TRS for a while…a bit funky. I remember using the old apples as well..fun stuff.
October 24th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
Hey! Whatever happened to the Vic20? That had all of 4k of RAM. Until I upgraded to a Commodore 64!
October 24th, 2008 at 11:26 pm
Having toyed with mainframes at the college was cool… but when my High School got a TRS-80 Model I in 1978 I was hooked. They still made us write programs on punch cards for an old Osborne which had no screen, just a printer, before we could play with the TRS-80. It was like being forced to make buggy whips before being allowed to drive a Mustang! It did teach us to be very efficient with our code though. The new languages, C++, Visual Basic, etc., make me twitch because of all the wasted memory and storage. Frankly, most code these days is just plain wasteful of resources. Sure, it’s cheaper now… but bigger is still slower… and more error prone.
October 25th, 2008 at 6:26 am
Nice information on this one. computer in our place was popular in the 90’s.
October 26th, 2008 at 4:19 am
I wonder why the original IBM PC isn’t there.128 KB and 2 diskdrives for the professional version, 64KB and no disk-drive for the home-version. Yes, you had to use a cassette-recorder!
Anyway, I still have TRS-80 Model I, 4, 4P, 2000, 16 and the Tandy 1000, HD, EX, SX, HX, TX, SL, TL, SL/2, Several Tandy 3000 and 4000, and the real portables, Model 100, 102 and 200. You could say I’m a collector.
At least one feature from the TRS-80 model II was used in the IBM PC: the keyboard as a serial device. Tandy was a first in ceceiving it as such. It was top notch in those days, with a blazingly fast Z-80A @ 4 MHz, + all the surrond chips for PIO, SIO and video-management. years later, it still outran the model 4 with the same CPU (but no support chips) And it had an optional HiRes Graphics board with 640×240 points. Also, pretty good for those days.
When I look at computers nowadays, I see utter boredom. Ther’s just one architecture left, even if several OSses use it. Even Apple is now Intel/PCI/USB. You can run Windows on a Mac, without problems. The time of diversity of the early 80’s will never come back, and that’s in some ways a shame.
October 26th, 2008 at 5:09 am
I started in computers in 1958!
These are therefore relatively modern PCs to me
I also helped design PCs with the first CPUs? - 8080 and Z80, and did it all in Machine code!
I still do!!!! sometimes.
Prices were high, but then so are digital TVs today - to me at least, on a pension!
Oh by the way, I am pre WW2!
October 26th, 2008 at 7:13 pm
Bought a Tandy 1000 SL in 1985 for $1800 with 2400 baud modem and Epson 9-pin Dot matrix printer. Only had a 5 1/4 floppy, a hard drive added $720 and I couldn’t afford it. This system lasted for 9 years and was very reliable. Ran Deskmate, tandy’s windows equivalent.
October 27th, 2008 at 6:12 am
Had an Eagle II around 1983, I think. 64k and (2) floppy drives, and a Brother (I think) daisy-wheel printer. Clack-clack-clack, all day long. Just $3200!!
October 30th, 2008 at 12:32 pm
MrMran wrote… The new languages, C++, Visual Basic, etc., make me twitch because of all the wasted memory and storage. Frankly, most code these days is just plain wasteful of resources….
I have been having this selfsame argument with some young ‘programmers’ I know… When I first started in data processing (as it was known in 1968), the company I worked for had around 2000 employees and thousands of customers… All accounting (payroll, invoicing, purchasing etc) was carried out on a 16k ICL 1903 of which around 8K was available to the programmer. One had to be extremely efficient and creative… These days, with virtually unlimited resources, all the guile and creativity has gone… C’est la vie…
October 30th, 2008 at 2:42 pm
Your all forgetting about the TI99-4A. texas instruments baby. I wanted an atari as bad as anything. My mother found it at Western-Auto and thought it would be better if I learned to make my own games since I was always tearing stuff apart to see how it worked.
Well it paid off. Im still in the Industry, only thing now instead of saving to a cassette tape I have multiple terrabytes of data to watch over. It sure as hell never got any easier. Just more bloated !!
October 30th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
It’s amazing to see how much technology has come over time, and how much the price has dropped. LMAO!
October 30th, 2008 at 4:57 pm
My first computer was a ZX-80 (http://www.nvg.ntnu.no/sinclair/computers/zx80/zx80.htm) and I had a home made (but my dad) 2Kb expansion for the ZX-80 with a incredibly fast 1Mhz Z-80 processor and 2 or four Kb of memory I don’t remember but I do remember getting the memory out error while programming in BASIC.
October 31st, 2008 at 9:48 am
It’s amazing to see how much technology has come over time, and how much the price has dropped. LMAO!
October 31st, 2008 at 10:37 am
It would be fun to put a newer PC into one of these cases.
October 31st, 2008 at 1:24 pm
What, no Datapoint 2200!? I WILL have to tell my Dad to hang onto his Apple III though.
October 31st, 2008 at 10:43 pm
I’ve actually still got a working Tandy Color Computer 3. It came with 128K Ram and Under OS-9 level II it did actual concurrent multitasking. Slower than snot by today’s standards but it was the coolest thing in the world back in 1985 for a paltry $300
November 1st, 2008 at 12:51 pm
Lipton,
I sure miss APL it was a great language…. Programing for non-programmers; but I sure don’t miss the old PC’s.
November 2nd, 2008 at 4:12 am
I owned the first Amiga that was shipped to Israel in 1983. I paid $5,000 cash for it. It came with the super 512K RAM (a module that was installed in the front of the machine).
Using the Amiga’s superior graphics I created commercials for businesses who advertised using the pirated Cable TV in Israel. I made my investment paid quickly.
I also owned a Commodore 64 and wrote tons of game codes on it using the POKE command and creating graphics. The Commodore 128 was a real treat with its white frame. I will never forget the $600 I paid for a floppy drive and the holes we used to cut on the side of the 5.25″ floppies so we can use the other side of the floppy to save more data than the 360KB…..
Today, I have 4TB of drives and it is not enough.
November 2nd, 2008 at 4:51 am
Does there always have to be the obligatory political satirist?
I don’t give a rats ass about McCain and Palin. I’m sick of Glorious Leader Obama and the leftist circle jerk that proceeds him. I came to this site to get away from this cantankerous territorial pissing and the drippings of other like minded individuals.
I came here to disassociate myself with the self indulgent moral relavists that insist on espousing this tired, made for tv political rhetoric to disinterested individuals who don’t concern themselves with such pedestrian concepts.
Save your annoying opinions for the pages which incite them.
November 2nd, 2008 at 1:54 pm
I had a TI 99/4a also and taught myself basic on the thing. Timex sinclair was out there too. Now theres PLD’s that can do almost as much.
November 3rd, 2008 at 12:23 am
You are all just kids. I still have my Altair 8800 that I built in 1972. When I say built, its not like today where you just plug in a few cards. You had to solder every pin in it. If you had 64k ( yes kilo, not megs or gigs) of memory, you were a super geek.
Times have sure changed.
November 3rd, 2008 at 10:22 am
As “Mark” says - give it twenty years (Hell, even ten) and folks will be laughing themselves hoarse over this article, and at “The Shit”.
The screen goes wobbly, and I think back to 1983. Our school bought a couple of RML machines for the sixth form. The rest of us scoffed at the geeky extravagance; well come on, as if anyone could actually *need* 256k of RAM! …POSERS!
November 3rd, 2008 at 3:59 pm
Oh Boy! Trash 80 Model II - Memories of three diskette drives in an expansion case - 8″ monsters clacking and whirring. Pickles & Trout CP/M …. I don’t even want to think about how much today’s $1,000 workstations would cost in 1979 dollars.
November 4th, 2008 at 11:40 am
This is where I learned basic - bought it at Sears. Came with a Word Processor and another disc that said CP/M Basic.
I learned to type in
For j = 1 to 100
print j
next j
And so started my obession.
Z80 chip
Amstrad
PCW 8256 / 8512
http://www.old-computers.com/m.....&c=189
November 4th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
I was born in 1988 .
First computer I saw was in 1997 .
The only computers I ever saw were the modern ones …
But DAMN … some of these old things actually look cool O.o
With those tiny monitors … orange screen …
OMG is that a LCD on Compaq Portable III ??!??!?!
You know what would be cool ?
Take these designs and just make them smaller or less bulky (and up the performance a bit ofc ) .
It would be a really CHEAP but still crappy computer … but it would look awesome !
Just imagine it !
You take out something from your pocket … its a monochromatic hand sized display (orange like on Compaq Portable III ) . Then you take out a folded keyboard and plug it into the display …
And WTF ! People are staring at you haxing on your mini computer !!!
November 5th, 2008 at 8:51 am
the computer has come a long way for us old timers.when i was young in 1955 i saw a computer talk on the old today show.[dave garroway],now pens and greeting cards tald to you for a $1.as always electronics evolve for the better,the first sony transistor pocket radio,your 1st fm radio in your car cassettes ,4&8tracks cd’s and now mp3 players.those old computers lead us to this point who knows where we’re going too.
November 6th, 2008 at 12:59 pm
You know I had a c64 in the late 80’s and do you know what was nice about it. It actually came with a book to teach you how to use it. I remember I didn’t know anything about programming and I picked up the book that came with and made a program to translate english to spanish from the examples in the book. Funny how you pick up a Windows machine and you really don’t get anything with it except a license to use it.
November 7th, 2008 at 10:12 am
Yo …Nice piece of info dude..!!!
November 8th, 2008 at 2:20 am
In 1984 $50.00 got me a second hand Timex Sinclair 1000 with 16k RAM pack, a big box full of programs on tape, and a stack of “Sinclair” magazines. Used that computer for over 5 years.
My next computer was an Epson Apex 8086 system with 640K RAM, dual floppies, and a dot matrix printer. This system cost me $800.00 in the late 80’s (I think. Can’t remember for sure), and was my introduction to the money vacuum known as Wintel. Spent a lot of money during the Wintel years on unnecessary upgrades.
Down the road (about 6 years ago) I built a home brew AMD system for $250.00 (including some freebie hardware from work and leftover hardware from older systems) and installed Debian on it. Then a few years ago installed Ubuntu on the same hardware. Bought a photo printer for $100.00 along the way, and a 1TB hard drive for $120.00 last week. Total investment over 6 years: less than $500.00. I hope to run this box well past the 10 year mark.
My personal opinion is that most people spend way too much money on home computer crap.
November 8th, 2008 at 6:57 am
We have on of those “Osborne 1″ in our company museum
November 9th, 2008 at 4:36 pm
There is a lot to the world of 70’s-80’s computing than PC’s:
The only ineresting machine listed in the article is the IBM “Portable” listed last, and that’s only because John Titor had/has/never had (depending on your timeline) one.
Stuff that should have been mentioned (incomplete list):
Apollo DNxxxx
SGI Indy
NeXT Computer (The original 25Mhz 68030)
Macintosh IIfx
Sun Sparcstation Voyager
IBM RT/PC
Symbolics XL1200, XL1201
November 9th, 2008 at 6:46 pm
@Nikon: It’s a plasma screen. Yes, really. For a long time they looked like the way forwards for portable displays, despite the fact that they guzzled electricity. The Compaq Portable III didn’t run on batteries
If you’re serious about homebrewing a pocket computer, have a look around on the net at other projects people have built. It’s fairly easy to hook a mobile phone LCD up to a CPU - Nokia 3310 screens seem to be a favourite for this
November 9th, 2008 at 9:16 pm
I own a P4 and had MAC OS on it. amazing.
November 9th, 2008 at 9:30 pm
My first computer was an Coleco Adam 80k ram with a high speed data drive and a daisywheel LQ printer that woke up the whole family at night. Then a C64, C128 and a IBM PC XT with a 20Meg hard drive….wow…good old days!!
November 10th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
Anybody remember the brand Zeos? I seem to remember the thing cost $3,200
November 10th, 2008 at 8:46 pm
Nice article, make me nostalgic of the time I started computer graphics with OCP Art Studio on Amstrad CPC (z80, 128k, 2sided 3″floppy), 4 colors (26 available) in 320×200! and no mouse…
Good old time when we were swapping things (codes, gfx, games…) via snail mail…
…
Then comes internet and streamed hd videos…
…
And finally finally old computers become overpriced!
November 10th, 2008 at 11:20 pm
My parents bought a TRS-80 a.k.a. Trash 80 and I used to sit there and type in my own programs to run. It was great when the cassette tape drive allowed us to play a tape and upload the program to the computer that way.
November 11th, 2008 at 6:01 pm
I was an apprentice in an Aerospace Company in the 80’s. We had three computers in the Design / Prototyping Dept. Brand new things, Marvelous things. A Huskey - a military version of a ZX 81, an Apple Lisa - everyone used it and loved it - amazing for it’s time - the dawn of windows if you ask me - it was used on a time share basis amongst the 60 staff in the deptartment - or rather - we had to log-out the mouse ball to use it hahaha. Then there was an IBM PC thingy. People turn-up, turned it on, looked at the cursor blinking, didn’t know what to do with it and promptly turned it off again. Never saw anyone actually use it. Complete waste of money. A bit like Vista !!!!!! The Apple however was in constant use. Marvelous machine - spoke to you in English with nice little dialogue boxes you could understand. SO HOW COME MS HAVE YET TO BETTER IT 20 ODD YEARS LATER. Micro Shaft. ttfn
November 12th, 2008 at 4:18 pm
You forgot the “ALTOS” and the COMMADORE - PET. Heck the first floppy drive (SS/SD) 5.25″ for the TRS-80 when for around $700.00 (US) and they went like hot cakes. Of course if you ever had to wait for a program to load (for 45 minutes) off of a tape deck, you to would have been waiting in line for the store to open.
November 14th, 2008 at 2:18 pm
I miss the ole TI99(Texas Insturments) computer from the 80’s. Me and my buddy use to play the Scott Adams adventure games, mostly all text. I miss the simpler times with no viruses too worry about because the modem was so slow, why even bother. I remember using a hole puncher on a floppy and making it double sided. Ah the days of yesteryear.
Cya,
Dave
November 15th, 2008 at 5:48 pm
Hey! What about the Kaypros! They were running about $2000 in 1983, with a printer. Great computers.
November 16th, 2008 at 5:57 am
I can hear My Sharona and Le Freak playing in my head. Nostalgia galore. LoL!
November 16th, 2008 at 1:46 pm
What memories! Yes, these computers were expensive.
I remember starting out with a Franklin Ace because I could not afford a true Apple II. Was that after the Vic 20? I can’t remember. HA HA
Then thank goodness for college computer programs, where I was able to get a Leading Edge PC with a 20 MB drive (about $1600) or so, just with my signature.
I still have one of the IBM 5120 (1980) computers and the Apple II, the TRS80 and about 100 more in my collection.
Please see my collection at http://www.mynewoffice.com/pcmuseum
Happy computing!
November 16th, 2008 at 3:14 pm
If I was super rich, I would pay 20K for the door stopper. Lol.
November 17th, 2008 at 8:13 pm
It’s funny to read the comments of shock and amusement looking back on this old technology. The funniest thing to me is however, if we are still around in 25 to 30 years from now, the comments of shock and amusement will sound very similar looking back on the archaic dinosaurs we currently think of as cutting edge and modern!! It’s all relative my friends!
November 19th, 2008 at 6:21 am
Still got a working Dragon 32, control greenhouse temp etc it has not been turned off for the last 10+ years.
Probably have to repair it when it eventually dies. bought 2 spare 32s last month for £3.
November 19th, 2008 at 7:43 am
I have any more information about sale this tehnologi.
November 20th, 2008 at 11:29 am
The Apple /// was expensive but it worked - I used it in my successful consulting business. Remember back then a box of 10 DSDD 5.25″ floppies cost $20.
Try to imagine what products and productivity resulted from VisiCalc and WordJuggler, not to mention the PFS: series.
Apple ///’s biggest problem was that it was based on a new premise: device drivers!! Once you got everything working - or paid me to do it - it was a great office machine.
All this was going on when IBM was serious when they announced no one would ever need more than 10 megs of disk space. BTW the IBM 23 was more of a waste than some of the ones that made the list.
November 21st, 2008 at 11:13 am
That compaq portable 386 with the plasma display made me around $750,000 dollars.
November 22nd, 2008 at 12:24 am
Started using the Apple LIsa and Amstrads back in the early eighties but didn’t get my own computer until the early nineties, a half meg Atari STFM, then a 1 meg STE with an exrernal floppy which i used like a mini harddrive and I use to install different desktops (KAOSDESK mainly) into a ram disc file on a floppy and it use to fly!!
Boot time from switch on to working in less than 10 seconds..
Then a secondhand 2 meg STE with a 20 gig external hard drive whch served me untill about 3 year ago when it finally went for recycling. The floppies were breaking down and the harddrive had started to clunk.
Happy Times.
November 22nd, 2008 at 6:47 am
How to use txmob mobile search - a beginner guide.
November 24th, 2008 at 2:20 am
was it necessary to blaspheme the Lord’s name at the beginning of your article?i was very offended-especially as i was directed to your site by a respectable person-i did not read anything after that!you should choose your words a bit more carefully and considerately so as not to offend people-if i was to insult your mother,who i don’t know- i am sure you would not like it-i do not like the Lord’s name-who you do not know-being profaned
November 24th, 2008 at 5:23 pm
Only one other TI 99/4a user, dang! I learned how to program BASIC on mine, with it’s high speed cassette drive. Spent hour after hour typing in game programs and saving them on my Gorilla disks,(when I finally got a floppy drive).
Remember those big thick books of games you could type in? Nothing but a title and code.
Anybody up for a game of “Hunt the Wumpus”?
fond memories.
November 25th, 2008 at 4:19 am
The pricing on these is ridiculous. Has anything sold?
November 25th, 2008 at 1:58 pm
I am old school, Class of 83` So in 81 I would get out of class and run to the computer lab to load Star Trek from cassette onto an Apple 3G and it would take like 20 mins to load.
Anyone remember going to Radio Shack and buying those computer magazines that had the code for the monthly “cool” game? You would spend hours typing it in and then it wouldn’t work. I hated that!, and yet I kept buying them….. Go Figure.
November 25th, 2008 at 10:23 pm
I started with a Sinclair/Timex ZX81 with 1K of RAM (yes, really, ONE KILOBYTE) . It was amazing what you could write in 1K.
Then the 16KB Ram pack (wobble it and your hard-typed program is history).
Then a 48K Oric (had to wait about 8 weeks until they built it.)
Then a Sinclair QL 128K, twin floopy drives, Motorola 68008 processor - I thought it was God’s gift!
(Had to wait about three months to be designed, tested, built, delivered - luckliy I had the brochure to drool over.
Then a Sinclair ZX SPectrum, then an APPLE II, then an Amstrad 640K/dual floppies, then IBM PC/AT with my first ever hard disk drive!
Then I bought a post-lease Compaq Portable III for about $700 ……
Then windows came along and I sold my soul to the devil (Goddamn it!!!)
November 26th, 2008 at 8:11 am
The thing about it is, You Know , people who owned these things probably invited their friends over to show off.
I can hear the vague bragging seeping through some time warp continuum,
“Look at this!! It’s the newest Sh*t out”
Litlte Known Fact
The Apple III (1981) was really designed by the guy who designed the original pop up toaster.
Strange Facts From http://thecomedynet.com
November 26th, 2008 at 8:58 am
I was given a Mac in the middle 80s that had been bought in the early 80s
for 3000+. It had no hard drive - you booted it up with a floppy disc - the double -sided floppie
weren’t out yet.
November 26th, 2008 at 10:32 pm
I sure could use some of these for a colection for my museum that i dream of,maybe some day someonenwill have the ressources to invent a building for computer oldies,for the sake of memory and souvenir noltagique….
November 27th, 2008 at 7:27 am
These are modern super-computers! I built my first computer in 1976 that featured 256 BYTES (not KB), nine LEDs for a display, and twelve toggle switches for a keyboard. No floppy or storage of any kind. Turn it off–lose everything… all 256 bytes anyway. Popular Electronics COSMAC ELF for the curious.
To the guy who claimed to have built an Altair in 1972—they didn’t exist until 1975!!!
November 27th, 2008 at 1:41 pm
I agree with Jeremiah. It is evil to profane the name of the almighty Saviour.This person will regret it one day when it is too late unless he/she repents before God, who sent His son to die for us all. read the Bible and find out.
all about it.
November 27th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
Do not use the word shit, it is very offensive, It is reserved for American films
Why does nobody mention the Acorn Atom ? Lovely little machine. It will do so much more than a PC. such as automatically listing everything in alphabetical order.
November 27th, 2008 at 3:20 pm
A few years ago we threw out about a million dollars worth of computer equipment - all old Unix platforms, left behind after AIX/Linux/HPUX/Solaris won the main prize.
tried to sell them but ended up having to pay someone to take them away:
Sun SparcStations, Data General Aviions, Siemens Nixdrof RM300s, HP 700/800s, Pyramids, Sequent PTX boxes, Dec Alphas, Altos’ etc etc…
….Sad to see a box that cost $90,000 chucked in a skip!
November 28th, 2008 at 10:37 pm
Hey you guys, you forgot to mention the Radio Shack TRS-80 model lll with 16K of Ram, and a tape drive for saving programs and other interesting items. Also, the bare bones Amiga was forgotten, this also used a cassette tape recorder for storing programs as well as games and other software. I think that today’s computers are spoiling us and making things too easy. Since when has anyone written a good program from scratch that contains thousands of lines of code?., probably only the programmers who get paid to create fantastic games and other software that’s available on CD’s and DVD’s. That’s my opinon anyway.
December 3rd, 2008 at 11:48 pm
Did you know that sound created by the Apple Lisa system was so far ahead of its’ time that SoundBlaster use it as its’ standards…rest is history…Also back in the days of ham radio in the late eighties we wired a simple style modem connected from our 2 Meter (147.000 mhz) handheld radios to the com port of whatever computer (sound card) at the time and DOS software and connecting on the internet (text based) before the internet was running!!!
Pet Commodore 2000 series in high school in ‘82 running Waterloo Structure Basic saving programs to cassette tape backup…had to learn machine language before programing…those were the days…
December 4th, 2008 at 7:15 am
very interesting! I owned an Apple II…old school
December 4th, 2008 at 7:19 am
I traded my Apple II to a friend for some cool plumbing parts in 1988, he ended up killing himself! I played games on the thing I got in 1982 I think, games by a new company called “Micro Soft”…oops, should have bought some of that hunk of shit! I remember telling a few people that Micro Soft sure had the best products, but who’d have thought that would be the biggest friggin company in the world (top 10 for sure)…oh well!
December 5th, 2008 at 9:35 am
I took to working at the storre that rhymes with “RADIO SNACK” in the 80’s to gather geekdom status and parts. The Trash80 was kind of being phased out except for institutional applications still running it. I remember running MS Works off of a floppy disk IBM Orig PC, dropping a screw that arced over the main board, sizzling a chip that somehow never affected its then SOTA (afew years back from when i owned it, but thatr was the way it went) performance. Having a ten meg AT at work that would make you try to finish work at noon so it could compile after during your lunch. An old boss nicknamed me the Wizard for my computer abilities then. I am a Wuzzzard now. You can, and I do, spend days trying to just maintain my system perfromance with useless processes and drivers hogging my resources. I think some cad programs wont work right without 128 meg of ram or so.Somethings lost but somethings gained, I guess. Like pre internet bulletin boards posting for 5 minute down load, a monocolor “Porn” picture. We may be all just fat dumb spoiled geeks, but I think I only paid a few (non-inflation adjusted) bucks more for my newest puter then my first XT…
December 5th, 2008 at 10:33 am
What the hell do you guys do with yourselves? I mean talk about sad!
December 7th, 2008 at 8:06 pm
Wow!
Thanks for the nostalgia.
The (lovely) old memories certainly came flooding back!
Thanks!
December 7th, 2008 at 8:33 pm
Ahhh the good old days. I still have my completely outfitted Radio-Shack Model I purchased Dec 1980, Model III, Model IV which looks a lot like the Osborn, sewing machine case styling but a regular pull out keyboard. Floppy drives were 5-1/4″ and cost $500.00 per drive, so between these and my Ataris I have 8 floppy drives which you could buy later on for under 40.00 each.
Still have my 1st printer which used silver cash register roll paper, dot matrix printers were around 800.00.
Even in 1992 hard drives were $1 per meg, the new 1T/1.5 T HD’s cost just pocket change.
Now you can do a major upgrade, motherboard, CPU, fan 2 gigs of ram for around 160.
December 7th, 2008 at 10:12 pm
Cool stuff here. Nice to read. Thanks for putting this together.
Funny to see how all those old machines get ripped apart and grinded through to new plastic, copper, gold, silicon… And in a few years from now - when only a few are left over they get auctioned off at Christies like old watches, ferraries, paintings…
December 8th, 2008 at 3:52 pm
THE LYNX WAS A LITTLE ROLLS ROYCE OF A MACHINE, NON BETTER. THE OS WAS AHEAD OF ITS TIME, IT JUST NEEDED A BIT MORE POWER.
IF YOU WANT TO LOOK AT SOME REAL OLD KIT TAKE A TRIP DOWN THE DECOMMISSIONED NUCLEAR BUNKER BY BRENTWOOD. BE QUICK THOUGH, THE WAY THINGS ARE GOING IT MIGHT JUST GET RECOMMISSIONED
December 9th, 2008 at 10:20 am
Thanks for the memories. I still have a working Compaq portable. It is sort of a slick little machine, and a great boat anchor as well, once it stops running. I like to toy around with it to see what I can get it to do these days.
I started programming with punch-cards also, man those were the days. Sometimes I wish they would come back. Programming today is not nearly as fun or intense, just an exercise in getting some work done as fast as possible with no concern about resources or efficiency. Anyone can program today, on any system.
Ah, the good ole days….
December 11th, 2008 at 12:05 pm
Will the IBM Portable PC run WoW?
December 11th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
This is some pretty old stuff, but it’s still awesome. I want them all.
December 12th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
WPN -
lighten up, champ.
These are the “ugliest computers from the past that came with outrageous price tags”… anon’s macbook pro comment was a joke that actually hits the nail on the head for those of us comfortable enough in our techy chopps to laugh at it. OF COURSE they didn’t make macbook pros in the 70s.
December 15th, 2008 at 9:39 am
crazy to think that back then this was pretty advanced stuff. my fone has like how much more memory etc and even my cars iDrive has way more lil feature things
December 16th, 2008 at 3:28 am
What a badly written article. Of course the price tag justified the computer. It was either that or nothing. These machines were still capable of saving hours upon hours of manual sorting and editing etc so they did have a place in the working world and things progressed from there.
Where do you think that electronic items will be in 30 years from now? Perhaps there’ll be as yet unborn prosaic morons to laugh and scoff at what you regard today as being the pinnacle of technology.
December 16th, 2008 at 2:09 pm
Ugly? Expensive? Compared to what?
In that times these were the most advanced piece of technology around, and any company (yes, the oldest ones aren’t designed for home computing) would gladly pay $10,000 for doing in a couple of hours what it usually took them days. That is net profit for a company. So “expensive”? No. You say the price didn’t justify. Of course it didn’t!! For a kid that only wanted to play a game it didn’t.
And “ugly”? That’s like saying that a Ford Roadster from the 30’s is ugly. Just because you were born 17 years ago and the oldest thing you know is a PlayStation 1 that doesn’t make the old things ugly .
I feel proud to say that I actually did a complete stock control and sales system on an IBM 5120 for a local company. It was one of the best experiences of my life.
Thanks for the memories.
December 19th, 2008 at 10:19 am
Wow, great reading. I thought i was old but some stories on here make me feel young and inexperienced. I was fortunate enough to work for a software house in the mid eighties who developed software and hardware for the sinclair QL, i remember the day we took delivery of the first Amiga to hit the UK (thats what i was told anyway), ah the bouncing ball demo. It enthralled us all for ages. Before this I remember I learnt about ticker tape at school and had the joy of doing my course work on a CBM Pet.
In the evenings I’d dial up bulletin boards and chat to the sysop. Cant remember what else we used to use them for!
December 20th, 2008 at 3:23 am
I still own every piece of hard ware I ever bought, which includes the Apple I, Apple II, NCR 286 machine, 386, 486, and the Osborn portable running CPM OS. The first supper application was VisaCalc, a spread sheet before there ever was excel. I believe Star was the first word processor for the IBM clones.
December 22nd, 2008 at 7:26 pm
Old Pc’s required great programming, much more fun attempting to get things going on an IBM PC with 16Kb of ram no hard drive and naturally only mono with ASCII text. For about £800 you could upgrade to 32Mb and if you were loaded a Hercules Graphics card would extend basic ASCII but still in mono.
Now the lap top I am using has more power than the AS 400 mainframe the whole company ran on!!!!
December 23rd, 2008 at 12:53 am
I had a Diablo which looked a hell of a lot like the “Dynabyte” with its twin 8″ Floppy drives and Green Chromocolor Screen. I used to play some useles maths game on it that was as basic as (1 + 7 =) Please Type your answer
If you got 10 in a row correct the screen would fill up with zeros & flash a few times then say “Congratulations you have beaten the machine” then you had to reload it all over again for about 2 minutes before you could play again.
I replaced the Diablo with a Microbee which wasnt much better but made some cool sounds.
No one ever mentions the Microbee? What ever happened to that company?
December 23rd, 2008 at 6:53 am
A quickie from the UK on prices.
After years of C64’s, Amiga’s etc I bought my first PC early 1994, a Compaq Presario CDS 625 (or was it 925? hey I’m 42 AND blonde AND female gimme a break on memory ability
It ran Windows 3.1, had 64 RAM and a 125 MB HD
£999
!!!
Current conversion = US $1,476
I just found your site today and loved the old computers article, cheers {_}>
December 23rd, 2008 at 8:42 am
LOL - “and the price no matter what anybody says didn’t justify whatsoever.” How
I laughed at that!
Yeah why didn’t computer users in the 80s just buy Core 2 duo Quad processors and 3GB of RAM? What where they thinking paying thousands for tiny mono CRT screens and tiny floppy disk drive capacities when they could have just bought a 2008 2TB drive from their local supermarket?
LOL. Why do people buy xbox360s now when they should just buy the one that will come out in 20 years time.
Slaps forehead - kids today - opinion simply IS history.
December 24th, 2008 at 2:52 am
I remember using logo at school in 1984-86? dont know what system. At school still, moved onto microbee and they had a network with a microbee master computer (server?) 128K? I remember the 5.25 inch floppies (and the hole punch) and later the 3.5s. My uncle worked at microbee here in australia and suggested one as a present to my brothers and I for christmas. I was searching through mums wardrobe a month before xmas and found it. I was 13 and read the manual, plugged it in and set it up and loaded games from the cassette tapes (Anyone remember VIPER the snake eating rabbits game on the microbee) come xmas day my parental units were amazed to see my ability to set up and demonstrate the microbee with no prior knowledge lol Before xmas I used to get it out and set it up and play games on it and then before they got home I would pack it away in its pristine packaging like new and unopened like nothing had happened lol. My uncle gave me a book of basic programs which I used to great effect at home and school and modified much to the amazement of the computer class. I gave the book to the teacher and we all became programmers. Remember 10 print” your name” 20 goto 10!. Esc The school used to have a dot matrix printer in the office that used to be in a noise proof box and it was even painfully loud with it all enclosed. My next computer was a amiga 500 with 1028 colour monitor and okidata thermal colour ribbon printer that was fantastic. Anyone remeber the animation “El Gato” or the Bladerunner animations. My alltime favourite game still to this day (dont play games much anymore though) is “Portal” on the Commodore Amiga. That game was lightyears ahead. The scenario was that you had just arrived back froma mission to mars and when you came back to the launch centre there were no people left on earth and in the hanger there was a gov computer with a blinking cursor waiting for instruction. From here you could wake other global gov databases and query them for information that eventually awoke the whole internetwork and leading you to discover the fate of the human race. That was impressive (wikipedia: “portal” -game). In high school I went for work experience to work in a mainframe facility and worked on reel to reel data drives for a gov dept. During 1985-87 I worked after school in a computer shop in darwin which sold some of the computers in this article. I used to go after school and dust the computers and clean up the showroom and spent many afternoons drooling over what was at the time the future of technology.
December 29th, 2008 at 7:15 am
i remember the apple commodore 64,they came to my school in the early 1980s when i was in junior high.it was a pretty awesome computer.i remember some of those old computers shown in those pictures of them,because i seen them at junior and high school,plus at certain businesses i worked for.they were all commodore and ibm computers,they were big machines at the time.i had my first pc back in oct 1994,it was a super 286 hyundai,it only had 32mb memory and 64mb hd,the mmemory was expandable to 64mb,i needed something stronger than that,because i kept on running out of memory everytime i had a couple of things opened.i was using aol 1.5 at the time when they went 19.95 total unlimited usage in late dec 1996.i was in aol,the main screeen appears,i clicked on people,then a couple of more windows would pop open by the time you finally got to the chat room for petesakes and it chewed up memory and resources like nothing.i would see a window pop open every 3 minutes saying you cant proceed,you ran out of memory or close some windows to free up memory.but its like how do i free up 32mb memory when its used in seconds.then later on i got a packerd bell 150mhz intel pentium with windows 95 and i used aol for windows 95.i cant believe i paid $1600 dollars for that computer in early may 1997.the computers that are out now a days completely blow away those old piece of crap computers
December 30th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
I WANT TO BUY SHOES
December 30th, 2008 at 11:04 pm
I should (somewhere) still have a 2k Sinclair computer (before it was changed to Timex Sinclair) with the bulky 16K expansion module. It featured a keyboard covered in plastic (like the old McDonalds’ cash registers) with out the now traditional keys; like air bubbles and plastic. I also had a connection with a red, white, and black wires which connected to a cassette recorder which i could store the programs i wrote in Sinclair BASIC in the early 1980’s. The programs would only last so long on the tapes before they were useless. However it was very fun, my first programming experience. I wonder how much it is worth?
I then recieved a Texas Instruments TI-99/4a which i adored, and kept my programs in a spiral notebook, the harddrive was huge and outrageously priced.
After this, i command the Atari 800XL in the mid-1980’s which i felt was extreme technology at the time ( although i wanted a machine that could render ’sprites’ {moving blocks} across the screen).
January 1st, 2009 at 8:03 pm
like whatshisface said, the commadore 64 was THE computer to have in the 80s even though the LISA (first GUI computer) was the coolest thing in the world.
January 3rd, 2009 at 2:32 pm
Yes the good ole days! The days when before the big box stores started dictating price structures to suppliers and they in turn to the manufacturing sector. I’m not suggesting that we as consumers need to be hosed but when we look at the state of our economy, you have to look no further than what you see right here.
At todays deflationary pricing, no one is making money and thats whats forcing companies to search for lower cost providers and cheaper labor to feed the retail giants.
Technology and Capitalism gotta love it
January 4th, 2009 at 9:49 am
I agree that the information given is interesting, but very poorly laid out. The way the border is included around the computer, it makes it seem as though the description belongs to the computer listed BELOW the description.
January 4th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
How about Ohio Scientific?
With their boards, I built my own 4 MHz 6502 system the size of an end table with an S-100 -like bus! In 1976…
I had 2, count em , two, eight inch hard sectored floppies! No hard drive of course. No hardware multiplier or God forbid, memory mapping!… Also built an Apple-II.
How about heaviest price ever paid for a hard disk? — 700$ for a _used_ CDC 70 MB in … ?? 198?
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