C-64 vs the world (vintage flamebait) (was Re: Micro$oft Biz'droid Lusers)

Waidaminnute, waiddaminute ... Just because you couldn't buy an AMIGA clone for cheap doesn't mean you can peg its cost to a BigBlue pricetag. I bought the board separately from the box, used a mouse I already had, and bought the VGA card (pretty pricey) from my ex business partner's retail store. The year I got my first PC/AT (I used 'em at work all the time, but didn't get one at home for a while.) I bought a 25 MHz clone (NEAT architecture) with 8 MB RAM and a pair of 700 MB ESDI drives for $1080. That was with a 1kx768x16 VGA display board. I hacked it to work with a fixed-frequency (sync-on-green) monitor I had sitting around. It was WONDERFUL. That was in early '89. more below ... ----- Original Message ----- From: "Fred Cisin (XenoSoft)" <cisin(a)xenosoft.com> To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org> Sent: Tuesday, April 23, 2002 6:34 PM Subject: Re: C-64 vs the world (vintage flamebait) (was Re: Micro$oft Biz'droid Lusers) I remember that, in '84, my partner and I were selling compete XT's using gray-market boxes with motherboards and putting our own drives, using TEAC FDD's and Fujitsu hard disks in 'em with a Western Digital controller and selling the entire thing with 256KB of RAM for about $1500. Now, I had connections with a local manufacturer that was using about 2880 of the 64K drams per hour, so it wasn't difficult to get a "price" on them, and a friend was at a local HDD specialty house, so when I couldn't get 'em cheaper directly or from the west coast, I'd get 'em from him. Nevertheless, we were only about $25 under most everybody else.