The very first computer I bought was a TRS-80 Model III. It cost me $1048, plus another $70 for the taper record. The tape recorder was the computer’s primary mass storage device. I kid you not.
I still have the tape recorder, the Radio Shack CTR-80A. One of my kids broke the lid off the top, but it still works. Here it is:
I suppose I keep the tape recorder as a reminder of those early days and the CLOAD command I once used to read a computer file stored on a cassette tape. Man that was agonizing.
I called my first computer Tom. He had only 16KB of memory. That’s kilobytes. It wasn’t the low-end computer; that model had 4KB of memory. Yes, that’s 4 kilobytes of RAM for the entire computer. 4,096 bytes.
You can see Tom on this web page elsewhere in Wambooli.
A disk drive for my Model III costs $800. That was $400 for the disk drive itself, a full-height 5 1/4-inch floppy drive that ate 180KB diskettes, plus another $400 for a 16KB RAM upgrade, bringing the machine’s total to 32KB of RAM.
Now that was a smokin’ hot machine!
Eventually Tom was upgraded with two disk drives, a serial port, plus an amber monitor. The machine came with a built-in black-and-white television CRT, which was murder on the eyes, so a better monitor was a worthy investment. I installed it myself, even — which I’ll never do again. Damn, that was scary!
I also splurged for the final 16KB upgrade, so Tom wound up with the full 48KB of RAM. (Yeah, “full.”) All-in-all, I spent about $3,500 on the system.
The computer was purchased for use as a word processor. But because I couldn’t buy the whole thing at once, I spent my time learning about what the computer could do. I even recall telling the salesguy at Radio Shack that I didn’t need to buy any software because I would be writing all my own. And I did. Man, those were the days.
The computer biz has changed radically in 25 years. Inflation-adjusted, the $1048 I spent on the TRS-80 Model III would amount to about $2,300 today (inflation-adjusted calculator here). That would buy a nice laptop or power gaming desktop. But it’s important to remember that high-end technology still has a price.
To put it another way, that $1119 investment paid out quite well.
Do you remember your first computer?
Yes, I do remember our first computer. It was the days of Windows 3.1, and it was an Olivetti. I think it was either a 386 of 486. I crashed it too many times to count, and put a variety of things into the floppy drive, including a small plastic lobster. Did I mention I was about four years old at the time? (About ten or eleven years ago, maybe more).
Nifty calculator, by the way, Dan. How’d you find it?
Comment by Douglas — July 16, 2008 @ 3:40 am
The calculator blew me away. I was trying to find inflation-adjusted prices and I figured I’d be able to fudge the numbers based on some examples, such as a car in 1980 versus today. But that link was the first one that came up. Amazing.
Comment by admin — July 16, 2008 @ 7:11 am
My first computer was a Toshiba Satellite, can’t remember the model. It had:
* Pentium 90 I think
* 40MB RAM
* 1GB Yes, 1GB! Hard Drive
* 14.4k Modem
* FM Synthisis sound card
* Windows 95, I think it was upgraded from Windows 3.1
$20.00 eBay
Comment by linuxlove — July 17, 2008 @ 9:35 am
Yeah, I had an IBM GL300! It ran Windows ME and had a Pentium 1!!!
There are calculators faster than it!
Had a 1GB hard drive too.
Comment by jack — July 17, 2008 @ 10:39 pm
I remember when a 1GB hard drive was just an overwhelming amount of storage, and expensive. Yet just the other day I bought a 4GB SD card for about $25. How times have changed…
Comment by dang — July 18, 2008 @ 8:11 am
The legendary Trash-80!! When I hear about people upgrading from 4kb to 16kb, I sometimes wonder if that was worth it. Ive heard a lot of people who bought the Commodore 64 or Atari AT were so satisfied with what they could do, that they didnt upgrade till the early 90s. Dan- I wish you could write more about what exactly you could do with those old computers. What programming languages did they support? Were programs all command line? Like many, Im a late bloomer to the home computer: late 90s with a Pentium I. You know there are people who run emulators for those old OS’s like the C-64 or Atari on their cellphones. If you have some free time, please tell us more of what it was like using those old computers.
Comment by BradC — July 21, 2008 @ 11:21 am
The most popular language on the old home computers was BASIC. The TRS-80 came with a flavor of Microsoft BASIC, which was pretty common. Everything was text-mode, command line. In fact, the old TRSDOS uesd many of the standard MS-DOS commands: CLS, DIR, and so on. I found a TRSDOS emulator for the Mac, but I don’t have any old TRSDOS software any more. 🙁
Comment by admin — July 21, 2008 @ 8:33 pm