this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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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

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

There was some commercial for the Commodore 64 which basically lambasted the IBM PC for being twice as expensive while having the the same 64K memory.

I was, like, "yeah, but nobody ever bought the 64K model of IBM PC. That would have been just ridiculously limited, right? Right? Everyone got memory expansions, surely?"

Well, 64K was the stock configuration, so I'm sure those memory expansions sold like hotcakes. There was even the option for freaking 16K memory. (Now, I'm sure next to nobody bought that.) Even option to getting no floppy drives, because you could always put your glorious BASIC programs on a cassette tape. Like a caveman. (This also sounds like a rare option.)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

@umbraroze C64 caveman with datasette drive reporting in o7

@TrivialBetaState

[–] BrownianMotion 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The IBM was Expandable to 640k, which Bill famously said "would be enough for anyone"!!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Fun fact, he never actually said that. Maybe Al Gore did when he invented the internet...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

We had a PCjr. Default was 64k, but we got the 64k sidecar add on for a whopping 128 kb of RAM. We also got a Hayes Smartmodem 1200 with the aluminum case and red LEDs that I still have, because it's amazing even though it's useless. Dad would use it to connect to Compuserv.

We never had the Chiclet keyboard, though - I think they were on to regular keyboards by the time we bought ours.