29 Sep
1998
29 Sep
'98
5:43 p.m.
On 29 Sep 1998, Eric Smith wrote:
IBM bragged about the fact that the single-langauge
16K version had a
list price of under $10K. That is comparable to the HP 9830, which only
had basic, and had 4K of RAM (expandable to 8K). Of course, the HP 9830
was introduced three years earlier.
I can't get to my 9830 price data right now, but Dave Hicks puts the 9830
at under $6000 for the base config, so with a $4K difference in base
models, it shouldn't surprise you that there might be a $10K spread for
certain configurations, which was my original point.
In any case, the IBM 5100 evolved into the 5110 and 5120 before the 5150
came out, and while all of these HP and IBM models can be considered
"personal computers", none of them had the impact of the Apple ][ or IBM
5150, and the main reason was price (or, almost equivalently,
market positioning).
I think the IBM 5100 was introduced September 9, 1975, when I was 13 years
old and throwing newspapers for a living. Had I been in the pc market
back then, my choices were the IBM 5100, the HP 9830, the HP 65 (which was
literally called a "personal computer" by HP), the PDP-8, the Altair 8800,
or the Scelbi 8H. If they had all been available for the same price, I
probably would have chosen the IBM, the Altair would have been comic
relief, and we'd all be programming in APL, but that's not what happened.
(Instead, I got a hand-me-down HP 65 when my dad upgraded to the 67,
which was perfect for a kid who just wanted to play Lunar Lander during
class.)
-- Doug