History Lesson

[mighty.grey.eagle]

This is going to show my age but the young whippersnappers in the department seem to think it interesting. Found some old papers yesterday that included a price list from Research Machines (whatever happened to them ). These include:-

 

Single Double Density Floppy Drive £492 (or £399 to education)

10MB Winchester £2467 (or £2220 to education).

 

These are from 1984. For those of you who weren't even born then the double density drive could hold 360KB (from memory) and a Winchester was an early hard drive.

 

Hope that RM prices have become more competitive over the years.

 

Now where is that Windows 1.0 disc?

[acb_]

My boss just got a glazed 'back in the day' look in his eye then

 

Sadly 'Winchester' means nothing to me...

[alan-d]

I think RM are still charging £492 for a floppy drive

[dezt]

I remember driving to Birmingham once with my dad back in 85 i think, to pick up a really good computer, i think it had a dd drive and about 20Mb of hard drive space.

 

It cost him around £1200 i think.

[Geoff]

You should of scanned the entire sheet in Dave

[projector1]

floppy drive? whats a floppy drive? lol

[john]

LOL @ projector1 I had a good one, had to setup a bit of hardware the other day, said ok i got the cables we need (quite old but only needed some simple common leads so said lets have a go before we bin and get new) and opened the box of info, packets that came with it, "ooh look here is the software that we need!" Was like ace, opened it up and was oh dear! Software supplied on Floppy Disk, now I hear you saying damn no floppys, but this was a bigger issue, the software was on 51/4" Floppy :D The question was where does this disk go, so the solution was between the CD drives But as a positive thing the thing with new sofware actually still works about 10 years after it was first made and its perfectly compatible with XP Pro!!!! Woo Hoo!

[contink]

Good grief... that's scarey...

 

My father brought home a Zenith "Winchester" when I was 8.. that's how I cut my teeth on computers and I promptly reformatted his hard drive twice (thus teaching him the value of "backups" )... But I had no idea that the hardware was worth that much money... I must have been playing with nigh on £6,000 worth of kit... My father must have been out of his tiny noggin!!!

8O 8O 8O

[Norphy]

This was the first PC in our house. It had a hard drive in it and everything. People were really impressed that I could play games without a tape