A trip down computer component memory lane.
Mikey 10 comments
This advert from the 1980's goes a long way to making you appreciate just how cheap computer components are these days.
The Xcomp hard disc had a whopping 10mb capacity (yes that's megabytes, not gigabytes) and you could pick one up for a measly $US3398. To put it into perspective for you, a few weeks ago I just bought a 500gb hard drive (that's 50,000 times the capacity of the Xcomp pictured below) for $AU130.
It reminds me of my first PC (after the Amiga), which was a Pentium 2, 233mhz CPU, 32mb of SDRam and a 30gb hard drive, which cost about $3500. It didn't even have hardware 3D graphics acceleration. That cost another $250 for a Voodoo 1 card. Ah the memories.
andrew
Tuesday 8th January 2008 | 11:01 PMmore storage, more speed thats funny!!!
CT
Wednesday 9th January 2008 | 07:48 AMFirst comp in my house was a 386 sx running at 8mhz. Cost 2500 USD at the time cause we got the RAM "upgraded" to 4mb.
Greatest thing in the world then was playing Wolfenstein 3D on it.
Clarke
Wednesday 9th January 2008 | 09:17 AMWhat can I do with 10mb these days...not much. A handful of desktop wallpapers or a couple of mp3s. So what could they do with 10mb back then?
Jake
Wednesday 9th January 2008 | 09:17 AMWe had a 386 as well, then a 486. Comander Keen, Doom, wolfensein, even leisure suit larry... such great distractions from the homework I should have been doing.
It's amazing that 10mb was so significant back then. I still remember back in the day my friends called me insane when I upgraded to 64mb of ram saying there was no way in the world I would ever need it in my entire life. Here I sit more than a decade later composing this message on a machine with 4gb (4096mb) and I am thinking how lovely it would be to have 8gb :-)
Rodney
Wednesday 9th January 2008 | 11:32 AMHaha I remember when my friend called me greedy for upgrading to 2MB of RAM! I even remember having a Wang (yes Wang) laptop (although it would probably break your legs if you left it on your lap :P) which had 78kb of RAM and a 10MB HDD.
Franken
Thursday 10th January 2008 | 08:48 PMWow you had 78kb! I only had 48k! Z-80 Spectrum ruled.
Rodney
Thursday 10th January 2008 | 10:08 PMsorry, my bad - that was a typo - it was 768kb of RAM.
My real computer (the Wang was a loaner), was a 80286-AT with 1MB of RAM and I think maybe 40MB of HDD. A fake Adlib sound card and a Trident VGA card.
Man Death Track was sweet on that baby.. ahh the good old days :)
andrew
Saturday 12th January 2008 | 12:18 AM4gb ,16gb i guess it will be never ending, but i guess home computers have come a long way since we first got ours back in 1994. amazing we paid nearly $3000 for a 486 that came with a matrix printer that would take forever to print out a page. and our first game we got($50) cost us another $500 to play it as the system requirements did not meet what the game needed.
getting computers back then was like people getting video machines, everybody gets one but no -one really knows how to use them.
and just to finish off, the pc package came with some games and our favourite was the kings quest game/series, probably not exciting to some but back then that was a game that all the family could play and it made you think.
OMG
Tuesday 8th January 2008 | 08:21 PMWow does that have 4 platters? If so that means there was 2.5mb per platter LOL. I wonder what speed it span at. Today's drives are 7,200rpm up to 10,000 rpm. I reckon that thing would have been sub 1000 rpm.