Computer purchasing lesson and drooling (was: RM Nimbus)

On 15 Nov 2000, Iggy Drougge wrote: Me neither... but now, since you've admitted to that, I'll admit that I once drooled over an IBM PC-AT (stopped drooling when I added one to my collection a couple of years ago). Back around 1985, still in college, I used (wasted?) some savings to purchase a genuine IBM PC-XT, with a 10 MB (ST-513, IIRC) hard drive, monochrome (not even Hercules) display and 256K of RAM and no math co-processer (I added one later so that I could install FORTRAN software)... US$2,895, from Computerland (can you say "con artists" and "clueless computer buyer"?) ... and regretted that I hadn't spent a little more and gotten an AT which was a more impressive looking machine... only afterwards, when I wanted to play with multitasking and began experimenting with things like C-task, VMiX, Wendin-DOS, Modula-2 coroutines, etc. did I discover that these weren't really useful computers. :-( Interestingly, that PC-XT cost about US$2,000 more than I'd paid for my car a few years earlier, but I'm still driving that car daily (why waste money on a new car?), and that PC-XT is now rarely used. There's a valuable lesson to be learnt from this: never spend much more money on a computer than you'd spend to purchase a 10 year old car, and never spend more money on a car than the average personal computer costs. -RDD -- Copyright (C) 2000 R. D. Davis "The best way to gain a true understanding of All Rights Reserved Wile E. Coyote on the Roadrunner cartoons is to rdd(a)perqlogic.com 410-744-4900 fly, head-first, off a horse into something like http://www.perqlogic.com/rdd a fence or a tree; trust me, this works." --RDD