25 Jun
2007
25 Jun
'07
9:43 p.m.
On Monday 25 June 2007 13:29, Liam Proven wrote:
On 23/06/07, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com>
wrote:
Fair point and some good questions.
For me, personally, what mattered was the first one under ?100. (At
that time, in the early 1980s, under US$100 would have done as a
comparison.) As far as I heard back then, Apple did the first machine
for under $1000. Very nice for those rich Americans in the prosperous
north or coastal states. Pure fantasy for a middle-class English kid
in the Europe. That was possibly the family's net income for several
months.
You make a very good point here. I remember watching the prices of TTL chips
in ads in the back of Popular Electronics and other magazines, and watching
them continue to drop, this being before LSTTL and all the variants that
came later on.
When computers came along, again I watched prices, as before that it was
only big iron, only available to those who had followed the proper path (I
didn't :-), and again, the systems were out of my reach.
I also noticed a trend that capabilities increased, features were added, but
there seemed to be a "floor" of some sort below which prices didn't seem to
want to go. At least not until computers and the parts to make them with
turned into commodities, which is what we have now.
I never did reach the point of being able to afford $1000+ for any of those
systems, though I did end up with a bunch of those systems much later on,
when they weren't considered to have any value.
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, ?a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. ?--Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin
>
The First Off-the-Shelf Microcomputer
On Sat, 23 Jun 2007, Lance Lyon wrote:
Errrr.... wasn't that the PET 20001 ?
Possibly.
Here we go again.
What does "First Off-the-shelf Microcomputer" mean?
First to go into design?
First announced?
First demo'd?
First prototyped?
First to enter production?
First "released"? (what does THAT mean?)
First that could be ordered?
First delivered?
First that could be purchased for cash in a store?