The computer itself, IBM PC XT ( 28KB Memory, one 10MB drive) would have cost you $3776.00. These are academic discount prices...
In 1991, my mid-level firm having being swallowed by one of the Big 6, everything was computerised, including audit. But the partners decided to buy six suitcase-sized laptops to be shared between around 200 people. We had to work by hand during the day, then do shifts in the evening, copying our work onto the laptops, each machine visiting as many as three people's homes in a single night. And we couldn't do much about it, because it was 1991 and so many of our other colleagues had already lost their jobs.
I did find it entertaining, though, that I was expected to audit our clients' computer systems for security when every computer the partnership owned had the same (obvious) logon and password. When one of the precious portables went missing, the assumption was that someone had tired of the house-to-house late shifts and decided to keep one for their exclusive use. The memos became ever more threatening, culminating in the statement that all the portables had an internal log and that Computer Services Would Know Who Had Been Using It. Um...not without a secret inbuilt retinal scanner, they wouldn't...
In those time I preferred the Sharp PC 1500 to the ZX 81 variants, as it had a nice (but very small) plotter with 4 colored pens ! (I still have it somewhere with the first portable Mac, a very heavy folding SE)... "What can I do, What can I write, Against the fall of Night". A.E. Housman
I was selling a pre-MS/DOS CP/M system in '82. Saw my first 5 Megabyte hard disk that we sold for 10K...or was it a 10 Meg for 5K? Anyway, it was a lot for a little. Never underestimate their intelligence, always underestimate their knowledge.
Frank Delaney ~ Ireland
:-)
In 1979 a couple of us put a Pertec fixed hard drive onto an Apple. One whole meg! (Gah-zang! Gosh, boy-oh-boy.)
The software was primarily designed for 6800 assembly language program development but also included a line editor which could be used as a primitive word processor. I went off to a one week Exorciser School that was more intense than anything I had experienced since college. Fortunately, I had the budget to hire experienced programmers who worked "second shift" to develop the required systems. It was a pretty cool system for the time.
The first p.c. that I owned was an Apple II with dual 3.5" floppies and, I think, 128 Kb of memory. This was '79 or '80. It had a slightly better word processor and, of course, commercially available software. The constraints of being the primary breadwinner for a family of 3 in L.A. meant that I kept that machine almost 10 years. But I wrote the seismic analysis that became the California State PTA's official position paper on that machine and my son learned to type with blazing speed and we all learned to enjoy computer games on it. As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
