Technology

59111 readers

3264 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

571

Cost of a 128KB computer with floppies in 1985 (sopuli.xyz)

submitted 1 year ago by TrivialBetaState@sopuli.xyz to c/technology@lemmy.world

100 comments fedilink hide all child comments

How much would you pay for a PC with 128KB RAM, and no hard disk?

In today's money (inflation adjusted)

This an ad from Personal Computer World (UK) from 1985

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] FReddit@lemmy.world 31 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well, actually this went from funny to tragic.

The company was called Need to Know, and it was initially in an old Victorian under a freeway overpass in San Francisco.

So I got the computer Friday and ran into this 23 line fail that evening. I called around 8:00 pm, expecting to get an answering machine. Instead I got, " Hey come on over!"

So I drive back to SF and get there around 9:00 pm. Somebody immediately puts a drink in my hand. People are just partying in a low key way. There are computer parts all over the place, but people are just partying.

So one of the guys took my machine apart, diagnosed the CPU failure, and replaced it with parts on hand.

I'm back in Berkeley by maybe 11:00 pm with a fully functional computer.

Here's where it gets ugly. I did business with them into the late 1980s. During that time , some psycho took on a grudge against them and literally burned their place of business down.

Several places of businesses, burned down sequentially. Fucking tragic.

I lost track of them by 1990. I don't know if they went further underground or what.

But they gave me a really human intro to computing. I can only hope they are well , wherever they are.

[–] can@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's a great story. Thank you for sharing.

[–] FReddit@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

I wish I knew what happened. It still bothers me.