We actually had one of those Macintosh 128 K machines in the lower left. My dad got two external floppy drives for it. The first lesson I remember learning, that I still remember is when the dialog box asks:
The company was called Need to Know, and it was initially in an old Victorian under a freeway overpass in San Francisco.
So I got the computer Friday and ran into this 23 line fail that evening. I called around 8:00 pm, expecting to get an answering machine. Instead I got, " Hey come on over!"
So I drive back to SF and get there around 9:00 pm. Somebody immediately puts a drink in my hand. People are just partying in a low key way. There are computer parts all over the place, but people are just partying.
So one of the guys took my machine apart, diagnosed the CPU failure, and replaced it with parts on hand.
I’m back in Berkeley by maybe 11:00 pm with a fully functional computer.
Here’s where it gets ugly. I did business with them into the late 1980s. During that time , some psycho took on a grudge against them and literally burned their place of business down.
Several places of businesses, burned down sequentially. Fucking tragic.
I lost track of them by 1990. I don’t know if they went further underground or what.
But they gave me a really human intro to computing. I can only hope they are well , wherever they are.
These modern $5 microchips probably have more features people care about too. Also they go like 100MHz on 3V and like 50mA (or less) of current. Or ~150mW of power or so and are therefore suitable to be run off of AA batteries.
I just googled the conversion of the price from 1985 to today based on inflation and then googled the exchange rate between the current value in GBP to USD.
Fun fact: flipping the switch on the surge protector while someone was working on one of these was absolutely devastating to their work. They would remind you about the incident nearly 40 years later.
Hey, I recognize you from this comment! You flipped that switch so many decades ago, ruining everything I had worked so hard for. I’ll always remember.
Those lost 50KB of work will forever be etched into my mind. Quite literally: the second I get my hands on a 30TB neurolink you bet your goddam ass I’m making a 50KB text file with your name on repeat, so that I’ll always hear your name echo in my thoughts. “u/[email protected] flipped my surge protector’s switch”, for x in range infinity
This is why the ZX Spectrum was so important, in 1982 it cost £125 for the 16K model (£469 or so now). That’s within the reach of many consumers. Sure, it was laughably simplistic even at launch, but if it wasn’t for the Speccy I wouldn’t be an IT professional today.
Whole bunch of low cost 8-bit machines in that era, the Dragon 32, Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC ranges to name but a few. Of course we must also mention the BBC Micro, was not low cost but every school had one if you grew up in the UK.
We had one in my school in Ireland too (and I think they were common in schools here) but tbh none of the teachers knew how to use it and so we got very little time on it in school.
So true! My parents got me the C64 when I had no idea about computers. I loved the Spectrum+ my buddy had at the time but always wanted the C128 another friend of mine got. My parents eventually upgraded my computer to an Amstrad CPC6128 when they saw that I was actually programming in BASIC. I learned a lot from that computer too, e.g. Fortran, Pascal, a bit of Z80 assemly (the last one was horrible!)
We had an Apple II+, IIe and //c. I would inherit each one when my family upgraded. They were around $1300 each I think. The //c might have been more because it was “portable” (you could put it in a suitcase with a 10-pound battery and a weird tiny horizontal screen that wouldn’t work with most software).
My grandparents had a C-64 which they never used. It basically became mine. I think it was $600.
Owned a //c that was all mine, a birthday gift IIRC. I remember that it had a composite output so you could plug it into a TV to play games on a bigger screen that actually had colour. Loved that thing, including the monochrome (green) monitor that neatly sat on top of it. I would spend hours typing in programs from magazines.
My dad got the Apple ]|[ (3) he even got a whopping external 1 MB HDD for the thing. The HDD was in the same case as the CPU, so it kinda looked like my dad had two computers sitting next to each other with the monitor straddling them
Someone donated one of those to my elementary school, but we had not software for it, just an Apple II emulator that had to be loaded on the floppy drive before loading whatever other software you wanted to run on it. Sort of pointless. I’m not sure why it was donated without software other than an emulator.
I was quoted £450 for 16MB in 1993. Approximately double that now with inflation. I was a 15 year old with a part time paper route, no way I’d ever afford that!
Don’t mind me. Just showing off the Sinclair ZX Spectrum bag I got a couple of weeks ago. I’m nostalgic for 5 minute loading screens that could trigger an epileptic fit!
The 80’s were certainly a different time. Especially when only allowed to access a computer at school for a few minutes in the day (Apple IIe) so all of us could “have a go at the computer in the library”!
I would never have imagined as a kid what it was going to be like today with smartphones and the internet everywhere….
“Only had BBCs”. The best 8-bit computer of their generation? ONLY had a BBC? You have any idea how lucky we were growing up with those amazing machines in the 80s-90s? I owe my whole career to the BBC, with an honorable mention to the ZX Spectrum I had at home.
I guess I went to a well funded public school… In 1984-5 we had a whole bunch of apple ][s so we had an hour or so per week of programming in basic- I had a commodore 64 at home so I could do the classwork in the first 5-10 minutes, then spend the rest of the time playing with it to see what it could do…
I was starting writing here to correct you that it had 48KB (like the spectrums) but thought to check on wikipedia and… you are right! Oh my goodness! 1kb and called a computer! And was a computer!
I do, wonderful machine. You could get a 16K RAM pack (most did) that made a huge difference. Problem is, if an ant sneezed in the next town over it’d wobble loose and the machine would crash. A dab of Blu-Tac was just the ticket.
The ZX Spectrum came out 2 years later and was far more capable, and reasonably priced.
Macintosh was always Apple. Apricot may have been trying to ride on the coattails of Apple’s popularity (I remember the computers but I’m too lazy to look it up).
Olivetti, from Italy, was pretty famous in Europe as a typewriter manufacturer. So it wasn't much of a surprise my father's first PC (and the first PC compatible I could use) was Olivetti PCS 386SX, circa 1992.
Turns out Olivetti is surprisingly important in computer history too. Olivetti made Programma 101, which was the first programmable desk computer/calculator, way back in 1965. If NASA bought a bunch of these, I guess it was serious shit.
Seriously, though, it’s no wonder why businesses had most of computers in the 80s; these companies were ripping people the hell off and getting away with it. Nearly $6 grand and you don’t even get a hard drive, nor a reasonable amount of RAM. Give me a fucking break.
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