Today in History August 12, 1981

I remember back in 1990 we used a DOS based program for our software. Yep the good old days. My 1st pc was a Compaq Windows 3.1.1

I had an older IBM like that too! Just don't remember the model.

My Brother in law gave me that exact model, green screen and all.

It had a 1 meg ram expansion card... was the full length of the box...more than a foot long.

I eventually got rid of it, but not long after I went to the Melbourne Museum to see the last/only fully complete and working First Generation computer [Csirac], and outside the room it was inhabiting behind glass was that same computer above.

That's when I thought maybe I should have kept it...;)

The 5150 was the first IBM PC.

I still have a Macintosh Plus that works. I also have the ImageWriter dot matrix printer, but I'm not sure if it works.

I recently gave 'my' Apple 2C to my brother in law... I actually paid all of $5 AUD for it complete ...;)

What a deal. There are several Apple IIc computers on EBAY for around $200-300 now.

I remember how excited the boys were with our first IBM clone - and Emerson as I remember it - had a black and white screen, I think...as opposed to the electric abacus I joke about. Good times.

Still have my TRS80 and an analog color tv to pair with it

Maybe some day when I have 36 hours free I will type in the Kaleidoscope program 

Need 36 hours be cause I type with two fingers and am bound to mess up at least 3 lines and have to inspect every line to fix it  

Over on my little island, The Amstrad 464 Was My First, 1985, Nomad Was The First Game I Played On It

November 1981 was when I got my first PC. It looked exactly like the one in the original post, except that it only had one floppy drive, until I upgraded it the next year. 64K memory, later upgraded to 256K. 

The machine on that price list at $1,565 had no disk drive at all. Sixteen kilobytes, a keyboard, a graphics card, and a port for a cassette recorder. With no disk in the machine you came up in BASIC out of ROM, and that was your computer for the evening. A monitor and a single floppy took it to just over three thousand.

The hardware was nothing special. The 8088 was 16-bit inside and talked to everything else eight bits at a time, which was IBM taking cost out of a chip that already existed. What mattered was that the bus and the memory map were published from the start, so anybody could build a card for it. The BIOS was the one part they kept, and the clone makers had to reverse engineer that the careful way.

Which is why I give the credit to the paperwork rather than the machine. There were better computers in 1981, and most of the ones that kept their insides to themselves are trivia now.

And the dollar was worth more than at present.

It was, and the headline number was the least of it. The $1,565 machine is the one nobody actually used. A monitor and a single floppy put you just over three thousand, and that is the configuration that did any work.

Expensive machines get kept, though, and that turned out to matter. Cards built for that bus were still going into PCs a decade later. Whatever else the price bought, it bought a slot standard that outlived IBM's own interest in it.