[ale] [OT] nostalgia - Happy 30th birthday IBM PC

[Ron Frazier]

All that talk of vinyl records got me in a nostalgic mood.  I heard 
about this on a podcast.

Happy 30th birthday to the IBM PC.  This is from Wikipedia.

"IBM announced the PC on August 12, 1981. Six weeks later at COMDEX 
Fall, Tecmar had 20 PC products available for sale. These products 
included memory expansion, IEEE-488, data acquisition, and PC Expansion 
chassis Pricing for the IBM PC started at $1,565 for a bare-bones 
configuration without disk drives."

Here are some specs, also from Wikipedia.

"Accordingly, the IBM 5150 PC was available with one or two 5-1/4" 
floppy drives or without any drives or storage medium ... A hard disk 
could not be installed into the 5150's system unit without retrofitting 
a more powerful power supply, but an "Expansion Unit," a.k.a. the "IBM 
5161 Expansion Chassis," was available, which came with one 10 MB hard 
disk ... PC's maximum memory using IBM parts was 256 kB, 64 kB on the 
motherboard and three 64 kB expansion cards. ... The processor was an 
Intel 8088 running at 4.77 MHz ... "

"the original PC proved too expensive for the home market. At 
introduction, a PC with 64 kB of RAM and a single 5.25-inch floppy drive 
and monitor sold for US $3,005 ($ 7,257 in today's dollars), while the 
cheapest configuration (1565 US$) that had no floppy drives, only 16 kB 
RAM, and no monitor (again, under the expectation that users would 
connect their existing TV sets and cassette recorders) proved too 
unattractive and low-spec, even for its time"

WOW.  How times have changed.  I remember whole rooms of these when I 
started college in 1983.  I also still have my first computer, a Timex 
Sinclair TS-2000 with 2K of RAM and a Z80 CPU or something.

Let's compare the IBM PC to the laptop I'm typing this on.

Price (today's dollars) - PC - $ 7,527 - LT - $ 380 - LT is 19 X LESS 
expensive
CPU Speed - PC - 4.7 MHz - LT - 2181 MHz dual core - LT is 928 X FASTER
RAM - PC - 64 KB (that's KILO, not Mega, not Giga) - LT - 8 GB (OK so I 
upgraded the memory.)
    If I'm doing the math right, 64 KB is .000061 GB, so LT has 131,148 
X MORE MEMORY
Removable storage: PC - 5 1/4" floppy @ 160 KB or .0001525 GB - LT - 
assume 4 GB memory stick - LT has 26,230 X MORE removable storage
Hard Drive - PC - NONE - LT - 500 GB - LT has INFINITE MORE HDD

I don't remember the specs on the old RGB monitors, probably 80 x 40 
characters of 8 bit color characters.  I could look it up, but this will 
make the point.  If the characters were a 7 x 9 matrix of pixels, that 
would mean approximately 560 pixels wide in graphics mode and 
approximately 360 pixels down.  That's a total of 201,600 pixels of 256 
colors.  Someone else may correct my numbers if they're wrong.

LT has 1366 x 768 pixels or 1,049,088 pixels of 32 bits which is 
millions of colors.  So the LT has 5 X MORE PIXELS.

Like I said, times sure have changed.  I wish we could do this with 
automotive technology.  I could own a nice Rolls Royce for, say, $ 5000!

Sincerely,

Ron

-- 

(PS - If you email me and don't get a quick response, you might want to
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Ron Frazier

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