Remember Coherent?

Liam Proven lproven at gmail.com
Fri Feb 6 11:13:04 CST 2015


On 2 February 2015 at 22:45, David Schmidt <david at attglobal.net> wrote:
>   And even I could afford it while in college - $99.95 from Mark Williams
> Company.

Ahh, the differences in trans-Atlantic pricing.

When I was at uni -- 1985-1988 -- I had a Sinclair 128K Spectrum with
an MGT DISCiPLE floppy interface, a single 780kB 5¼" drive and a
Panasonic 9-pin dot-matrix printer. I was far & away the most
high-tech person in my year. That little assortment cost me about £300
over 2-3y, and that was a massive stretch of my budget. Each single
component was as far under GBP100 as I could find, because there was
no way in heck I could afford to drop a hundred on my computer.

So any thought of a PC-compatible (price then, several thousand
pounds) was not even a daydream.

A year or so after I left, I bought an Acorn Archimedes A310 -- an
8MHz ARM2 with 512kB of RAM, a 20MB ST-506 HD and an 800kB 3½" floppy
drive. With an actual *monitor!* (I used a TV on the Sinclair.) That
had multitasking & a GUI and everything & I lost interest in x86 kit
until it finally died, about 5y later.



-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
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