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Vintage Computers Any vintage computer systems, calculators, video games etc., but with an emphasis on 1980s and earlier equipment.

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Old 8th Jun 2012, 10:32 pm   #21
julie_m
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Default Re: Prices in 1996

Writing BASIC programs to display messages on screen was a bit tame, though, compared to what some of us got up to!

I had a friend who wrote what was basically a simple sector copier for the BBC model B. He then made several copies on floppies labelled "Watford Electronics DFS Compatibility Checker" (the Watford disk system was based on a different chipset from the official Acorn offering, and so slightly incompatible with it. Many games "hit the metal" directly, and so wouldn't work properly with it).

He would ask in a store to borrow some game to "check the disk for compatibility with his Watford Electronics disk system", boot up the "compatibility checker" and it would display the Watford Electronics logo and prompt for the game disk. After 8 disk swaps, it would stop with an error -- "Sorry, not compatible with Watford DFS". Of course, the "checker" disk now held a perfect copy of the game. Made right under the nose of the shop assistant, who was none the wiser!
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Old 9th Jun 2012, 10:27 am   #22
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I had a friend who wrote what was basically a simple sector copier for the BBC model B.
I guess that's why they introduced copy protection systems. I once had a program which claimed to crack the copy protection system used by programs like dBase 3. I can't remember what the protection system was called now. The program came with a README with a phone number in the US saying basically if you have any problems feel free to phone any time of day or night for help. I phoned the number and it turned out to be a company selling a rival copy protection system trying to sabotage the competition. Maybe they were successful. In any case, dBase switched to another system.
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Old 9th Jun 2012, 12:11 pm   #23
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I guess that's why they introduced copy protection systems.
Which are intrinsically doomed to failure, because the special code to read the non-standard disk format must be on the disk and readable by the unmodified OS ..... But we're drifting. So if anybody wants to carry on this conversation elsewhere, please PM me and I'll start a new thread on my personal blog.
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Old 9th Jun 2012, 12:44 pm   #24
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... But we're drifting. So if anybody wants to carry on this conversation elsewhere, please PM me and I'll start a new thread on my personal blog.
Thank you for pointing that out. Sentiment seconded by the moderators!
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Old 11th Jun 2012, 2:30 pm   #25
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Love seeing old adverts like that. We didn't have a home PC up until mid-2000, when we went for one of those package deals from Tiny Computers (remember them?). It was a Pentium III based machine (running Windows 98) with 128MB RAM, 30GB hard drive, with the usual gubbins (a printer, scanner, desk, free software etc). Total cost: £1200!!

Internet was from CableTel (name changed to NTL, and nowadays known as Virgin Media). We usually got a consistent 53.3K via the MODEM thanks to their fibre optic network, but you had to reconnect every two hours.

Previous to that I'd been at college where they had new 600MHz AMD based machines put in to replace some older Pentium and Pentium II (MMX) machines. At school (1994 to 1997) we had a mix of Acorn A3000's and Windows NT/3.1 Pentium PC's, although you could tell by then that the Acorn's were pretty much on their way out.

I'm glad the technology has stabilized, as you can pick up a reasonable spec laptop for £400, and build yourself a desktop PC for not much more, with no real worry of it being obsolete soon after. Even my six year old Pentium M laptop can just about hold its own.

Cor blimey £2700 for a 200MHz Pentium!
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Old 13th Jun 2012, 10:12 am   #26
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until mid-2000, when we went for one of those package deals from Tiny Computers (remember them?). It was a Pentium III based machine (running Windows 98) with 128MB RAM, 30GB hard drive, with the usual gubbins (a printer, scanner, desk, free software etc). Total cost: £1200!!
I do indeed remember Tiny. We had a family business then and bought half a dozen Tinys ! Not even Pentiums though, they were 486 based machines.
Prices were mad then but only in perspective with looking back from now. Compared with the first network system we bought they were cheap! Like all electronics really.
I still have one of those 486 machines in storage somewhere.
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Old 15th Jun 2012, 2:57 pm   #27
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I have a MacUser magazine from 1988. One advertiser put together bundles aimed at drawing offices, designers and printers.

At the bottom end came a package of Mac SE (the little all-in-one with tiny black and white monitor) with 20MB HD (no mention of RAM - perhaps 500k or 1M), Imagewriter II dot matrix printer, Pagemaker, Illustrator and Word3 programs and ten floppy disks. List price quoted at £4400.

At the top end is something called the 'Designer's Dream' a Macintosh II (which could do colour and I think ran at about 8MHz), 45Mb HD, 2MB RAM, 'A3' colour monitor (probably 19 inch) and video card, A4 Laserwriter IINT, Microtek scanner (this might well be greyscale only!), programs as above plus a painting and image studio program weighed in at a cool list price of £16,900.

A friend of mine who had a little publishing company bought an all in one Mac around this time along with a Laserwriter and all the programs and gubbins and I remember that he spent in the region of £10k. He got his investment back in no time saving on typesetting and artists' costs.


I've had a number of Macs over the years and since the mid 90s and have found that a budget of £1000 has usually got me a more than adequate mid-range one that will last some time. The current incumbent is now 10 years old and though working faultlessly cannot run the the recent incarnations of OS or programs. However I find that £1k will secure me a pretty good iMac. And if my CRT screen wasn't aging too I could probably get away with a Mac Mini for a few hundred.
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Old 12th May 2014, 7:34 pm   #28
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I came across this thread when browsing past entries. I'm a new member and doing a bit of catchup. Way back in, IIRC about 1979, I built my first computer - a UK101 kit. Great kit and it worked first time! It was 6502 based and came with 1k of memory. I rapidly decided though that I had to expand the memory and lashed out another £200 on the chips for the second 1k. Looking at the 2TB drive hooked in to my laptop, at those prices it would have cost me £400 billion! Staggering changes in just 35 years.

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Old 12th May 2014, 10:30 pm   #29
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Default Re: Prices in 1996

For anyone who wants to do date related relative price comparisons this site is useful.

http://safalra.com/other/historical-...ce-conversion/

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Old 13th May 2014, 3:12 pm   #30
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Default Re: Prices in 1996

Think I paid around £70 for extra 2Gbs of Ram .Compaq Presario cost me £1500 (1998).
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Old 13th May 2014, 6:58 pm   #31
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Default Re: Prices in 1996

PCs were expensive. We bought a 486 for about £2,000 in 1993! It was however very well made (only recently stopped using the keyboard, and only on account of buying a laptop). In some form or another, it was in use for a long time as we later added a sound card and CD drive, and eventually replaced the motherboard and hard drive - which wasn't too costly compared to a whole new computer as many parts were still compatible and current enough. Upgrading was more realistic then, but now after a couple of years everything seems to have changed too much. I looked in to upgrading a computer that was about 3 years old and it wasn't really possible. Not even the power supply could be retained! It's a very good thing they're so much cheaper now.
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Old 13th May 2014, 10:16 pm   #32
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Default Re: Prices in 1996

It's always interesting to compare prices to typical wages through the epochs: if you look at the price of a basic 405-line single-channel TV in 1939 it cost about as much as a middle-of-the-range Austin or Morris car.

The first PCs I specced for corporate applications in 1986 were twin-floppy-drive beasts with 384K of memory and a monochrome text-only screen - think £3500 or so [which was then about half a white-collar-worker's annual salary!]

If you wanted graphics [at something like a 450x300 resolution, monochrome of course] you specified a Hercules graphics-card and the price went up by £700 [to support the Hercules card you needed extra RAM]
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Old 13th May 2014, 10:47 pm   #33
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It was in 1996 that my twin daughters came home from pre school "4 years old" and announced they wanted a computer each with colour printer just like they had been using at school, for their Birthdays! ISTR we bought a used one a year or two later after they had started Infant school.

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Old 15th May 2014, 4:46 pm   #34
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Yes, tin box with 386 motherboard, 1MB RAM, floppy and PSU for over £1000 in 1990. The multifrequency VGA monitor and board for £600. Still using the case and monitor but the floppy didn't work when I wanted it a few weeks back. 386 replaced by a 25MHz 486 but it is still in regular use, every couple of weeks or so, beat that! Tried upgrading to Windows PIC software, ughh, so went back to DOS and been there ever since.

I do wonder if people realise just how much of a pay rise they have had in the last 20+ years with the collapse in the price of just about any manufactured article. It isn't going to continue so have to pay the price plus positive inflation from now on. It could hurt. It hurts me, I am charging the same now for my measuring equipment that I did when I started in 1992.
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Old 20th May 2014, 10:48 pm   #35
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In late 1996 I got my first PC, a uni cast-off: 386 olivetti, 4MB RAM, 25mhz processors, win 3.1. Hard drive probably about 30 MB. Not bad for 30 quid!

Replaced it with a second hand 486DX2, (50 mhz, 400mb HDD) bought as faulty from a charity shop in 1998. I think that cost about 20 notes with monitor, which to me was a real bargain back then. I replaced the floppy drive and sound card, spent about 35 pounds on used 32 MB RAM which seemed impressive at the time. I got my first home dial up connection on that, and did all my uni dissertations etc. on it. Hard to believe now that back then, you could surf the net with that spec!

I kept that 486 until around 2002. My GF's mother then used it for three or so years to learn how to use the word processor. I vaguely recall dumping it circa 2007 and giving her a (fairly old) laptop that took up less space.

In mid 1996, I also picked up a second hand Amiga 1200 for music and sampling, that had a whopping 300MB hard drive! Can't recall what RAM, but it had an extra card shoved in a slot below. Paid 200 notes. Still have it too, but hasn't been powered up for a decade.

I consider myself fortunate never to have paid more than a couple of hundred for any of my computers, yet they all served me well. I'm typing this on a 1.8Ghz AMD (self-built) from circa 2004.
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Old 21st May 2014, 6:25 pm   #36
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My first pc was a Compaq Presario something or other laptop, back in 2001. It had an AMD Athlon (I think?!) running at 800 mhz, with 256Mb ram and 30gb HDD running Windows XP. Cost me £1100!! That's when I was at college and they paid me £50 a week to go there, I had to do it on buy now pay later, took me ages to save that up! I actually still have the machine, and it still works, I upgraded it with 1Gb ram and a 60gb HDD, and somehow the processor now runs at 1100Mhz, not sure why?

I've had several laptop's and desktops since then, all have been less than 4 figures, even my newest Sony Vaio with Intel i7-3632QM 2.2ghz, 8Gb ram and 500Gb HDD, which came out at just over half the price of the Compaq.

The cheapest PC I got was at a car boot sale last weekend, £10! It's in a nice Antec fusion media centre PC case, which is all I really bought it for as their normally expensive, it has a dual core AMD (which I haven't really looked at yet) 4gb ram and a 160gb Hdd with Windows 7. I'm hoping my boss is going to let me have one of the no longer used mini ITX motherboards with an Intel i7 and 4gb ram to go into this case!

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Old 7th Jun 2014, 9:44 am   #37
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Reminds me that my first PC was a Dell System 486 SX-25 with a then unusual 15" monitor! Second hand from a short lived shop in Reading for £750, it was an absolute bargain. 4Mb RAM, 120Mb hard drive.....and it was the "system" rather than "dimension" aimed at businesses. It had a 2Mb video card on the motherboard and when overclocked to 33MHz it could run games in pentium mode as the video throughput was phenomenal.

That machine ended it's days in my dad's home office running Win 98SE with a 500Mb hard drive, CD-ROM drive and sound card around 2004. Lasted a good long time.

The price of computer hardware has gone down, with mechanical machines now being more expensive.

I remember ESCOM, we had one in Letchworth where they took over Rumbelows. About a week before they closed I bought an HP colour deskjet of some description for about half the list price.

These days I have a bottom of the range Toshiba laptop, bought in late 2013. It does everything I need of a laptop. However my desktop PC is a quad core 4GHz built and optimised for editing HD video - a hobby of mine.
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Old 30th Jun 2014, 4:50 pm   #38
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Well at a time when Olivetti, IBM et al were producing 8080 and 286 PCs with monochrome monitors at 1.5k-2k a pop, along came Alan Sugar and produced an Amstrad PC for under 1k. The cheap color monitors didn't half give you eyestrain though! I seem to remember our Uni had a new GUI OS called GEM v2. We then got an Olivetti Windows 3.0 PC with 2mb RAM that could just about manage to load a Paint drawing about 300px by 200px in size! Most of the PCs had either a 10mb or 20mb hard drive. They also had 5.25 floppy drives with diskettes that could actually be flopped and I remember being instructed to treat them with care: "just because they can be flopped doesn't mean that you should flop them". There was also some kit that was no longer in service and had 8in floppy drives, which I think took 128kb of data compared to the 5.25in ones that took 256kb or 1.2mb if you had the HD ones (rare) and a drive that could read them. Those A0 plotter pens BTW were an absolute pain for running out. We also had JANET, e-mail and even the Mosaic web browser long before the Internet became a global household phenomenon.

I am still amazed that what once took a large power hungry desktop machine with a processor that needed a large heatsink and a big CRT monitor, can now be done and far surpassed, on a small hand held device with a 3v battery that runs much faster, has a higher screen resolution and an order of magnitude more storage. We have certainly come a long way.
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Old 30th Jun 2014, 9:25 pm   #39
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I recently visited the so called 'Secret Bunker' at what was RAF Holmpton near to Spurn Point. It started life in 1953 as a Radar Station, and was a nuclear command centre during the Cold War era. In 1985 it was given the name of RAF Holmpton and converted to become a new Headquarters for RAF Support Command and this HQ remained at the site until the end of 1991 (The end of the Cold War). It's reasonable to assume that no expense was spared in equipping such establishments with the most advanced computing equipment of the day. Looking at the chunky keyboards, huge CRT monitors and phones that looked positively antediluvian, it made me realise just how much the technology - even everyday consumer electronics - has advanced in the last three decades. We were ushered into a huge cathedral like room which had been stripped bare. The guide said "this is where the computer used to be". Someone said "it must have been a very powerful computer". The guide said "yes - by the standards of the day" then pulled a 64GB memory stick out of his pocket, and said "nothing like as powerful as this £10.00 memory stick, nor the mobile phone in your pocket".

It makes the six manned moon landings that took place between 1969 - 1972 seem all the more remarkable. (Not just the landings, but getting back to earth safely).

A week or so ago, our younger son and his wife were in Mauritius - we had a chat on our I-pads on 'Facetime' - all taken for granted.
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Old 30th Jun 2014, 11:25 pm   #40
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When watching something like the Professionals TV series, in a scene in their computer centre, it always astonishes me how storage has developed! Inevitably one of the girls in the computer room will load a huge tape spool onto a tape reader when a request for some data is made, and I just think wow, one of those tapes would have had a maximum of 140MB storage with access times as much as 10's of seconds. I carry a 16GB USB stick much smaller than a pack of chewing gum with almost instantaneous access, that cost about £8!! And that is by no means state of the art! So those tape readers were circa 1976, about 38 years ago. Try to imagine what the next 40 years will bring us? I have and I can't!
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