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
this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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It's crazy how Computers have changed over the years !
I guess people who have used PC's from the old era would be able to appreciate the current Computers in a completely different level.
When I remember back to the early 80s, me a single digit aged human with my first Commodore 64 and a cassette tape drive, to being a high school aged kid and helping my buddies install their extended memory set chip by chip to get them to 1mb of ram, to way in the future where I type this comment on a mobile phone touch screen capable of unfathomable high resolution graphics and speed is still a surreal feeling.
I grew up and grew old with computers and it’s wild to imagine a life without and a world without them nearly 50 years later.
A computer with a spreadsheet was a HUGE game changer.
In '85 most companies did books by hand and adding machine. Records were kept in ledgers and in filing cabinets. People used to hire CPA's to come in and do the balancing even in small convenience stores. Given labor wasn't what it is now, but a machine like that could pay for itself pretty quickly.
I worked a fast food job in the 90's They had an ancient box running 1-2-3. Every night, the MOD would have to sit down with a paper sheet and an adding machine to generate this table, then enter all the transformed data into Lotus. They literally sat back there for hours working over the data. I asked, why don't you just change the sheet to do all the calculations? Can't, the franchise owner wants it all done by hand. They were literally taking a row of numbers, doing some math on it, then doing more math on each column to come up with a final row of like 7 numbers.
I had them show me what they were doing and wrote a program on my TI calculator to generate the table from the input numbers. Told them if they wanted the program just to get the same calculator and I'd transfer it over.
Nobody trusted computers.. they were 'new'. It wasn't entirely unheard of for people to verify the output of a computer by hand, or as in your case, doing it by hand intentionally.
The old computers from my childhood still boots faster than any modern OS 😎
Never mind computers (my first one, in I think 1985, had two floppy drives and an amber screen, very fancy), it's phones that blow my mind. I grew up with a heavy black bakelite dial phone that lived on a special bench in the hall, and now I do video calls with my family on the other side of the world from wherever I happen to be. Toll calls used to be a huge deal, you had to call the operator, we didn't even have direct dialling. I watch TV on my phone, not even Star Trek had that!