How much would you pay for a PC with 128KB RAM, and no hard disk?

In today’s money (inflation adjusted)

This an ad from Personal Computer World (UK) from 1985

  • Brownian MotionEnglish
    59•1 year ago

    So everything is about right. Today you can buy a budget pc, and skim on performance, but back then (and I was there man!) you could not.

    In 1985 HDD were only starting to gain traction for PC’s and that was about the only thing you could spec up. That IBM pc is “High Res” which probably means it was VGA multicolour (yay!lol) with 640x480 resolution. So you were basically buying top of the line.

    Today, if you were to build a top of the line PC, RTX4090, latest best intel cpu, PSU, etc, etc it would be easy to spend $5K!

    But damn, the difference in performance from back then to now!! (That IBM is an XT which means it was a 4.77Mhz with 8086 cpu. Just looking at that picture, I can feel the weight of the bloody thing)

    • @[email protected]English
      15•1 year ago

      I was there too but vga was not. My dad got an IBM XT fully specd as a home computer (he was CFO of Emma EDB). I believe the hires could be EGA or probably Hercules as they don’t brag about colours - but his had CGA. The full spec of my dads pc - that changed my life - was: 2x256kb ram on full length isa cards. 10mb hdd, 360kb floppy. 9pin printer and cga. Total cost back then in Norwegian KR was 120000.

      • @[email protected]English
        6•1 year ago

        After checking with my dad the price was half of what I stated. He got one for home and one for office - the business he was with was providing IBM mainframes, and wanted to check out the PC. My dad got them because of Lotus 1-2-3 - spreadsheets was the shit in accounting/ finance already

      • Brownian MotionEnglish
        2•1 year ago

        Might be right, could have been ega. It was a long time ago and the mind is wobbly.

        • @Num10ckEnglish
          3•1 year ago

          yea 8086 couldn’t drive a vga. 16 preset ugly colors if you’re lucky. unless you had a magical amiga with dedicated graphics chips to do 256 colors, 4096 if you’re nasty.

          • @[email protected]English
            1•1 year ago

            Sir, I’ll have you know that I had an IBM PS/2 Model 25 with 256 glorious colors in MCGA. And fuck every developer that didn’t support MCGA, because it dropped down to 4 color CGA if not. No support for EGA.

            • @Num10ckEnglish
              1•1 year ago

              and i’m sure you learned your valuable lesson :)

    • Square SingerEnglish
      6•1 year ago

      Also, these PCs back then were heavy (=>much more resource intensive), handbuilt and low-volume. All things that add a lot to the price.

      • @[email protected]English
        2•1 year ago

        I don’t know about resource intensive, today you need a frigging powerplant to feed a decent PC. At least the 286 and onwards didn’t consume that much right?

        Edit: It was not about running costs but the resources to Build them, and that’s true for sure! Sorry!

    • @WhiskyTangoFoxtrotEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      Today you can buy a budget pc, and skim on performance, but back then (and I was there man!) you could not.

      For PCs? Maybe not, but you could get plenty of other types of home computer for reasonably cheap. A Commodore 64 was $150 in 1985, for instance. Just had to stay away from the absolute bleeding edge.

    • FerrisEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      eh. Money is worth a third of what it was worth.