[red-beard]

Memories....

I still have the 1.5MB disk pack I purchased for personal storage on a Prime 300/550. I think I had to pay $70 for it around 1981!

I had a C64 in college. My father was notoriously cheap and wouldn't spring for the Apple. Montgomery Wards had a deal on the C64: Dual Floppy unit, CPU, Printer, Green Screen monitor and modem, $799. I think it was around 1983/84. Even having the C64, I was one of the few kids at Texas A&M that had a computer in the dorm.

In 1988, before I took my first field engineering job in India, right out of college, I bought a Toshiba 1200HD. I think it was around $3000, had 640 kilobytes of RAM (upgraded to 2MB), a 1200 baud modem (very fast for the time!), 10MB hard-drive, and a non-back-lit LCD screen. I know it was an 80C86 processor, but I don't remember the speed? 4.7Mhz, maybe?

That and a portable electronic typewriter (Thermal paper or plastic print cartridges), which doubled as a portable printer, was WAY out on the tech curve in the USA and just blew people away in India. Having a way to print even small documents was fantastic.

A few years later, our field engineering laptops (cough - 15 lbs!!!) had external CD drives and we had access to enormous amounts for field data sheets, service manuals, etc. 640MB of data was GIGANTIC.

Seems so paltry today...