Jester49

Reply to Today in History August 12, 1981 in Personal Computing Stardock Forums

It was, and the headline number was the least of it. The $1,565 machine is the one nobody actually used. A monitor and a single floppy put you just over three thousand, and that is the configuration that did any work. Expensive machines get kept, though, and that turned out to matter. Cards built for that bus were still going into PCs a decade later. Whatever else the price bought, it bought a slot standard that outlived IBM's own interest in it.

Reply to Today in History August 12, 1981 in Personal Computing Stardock Forums

The machine on that price list at $1,565 had no disk drive at all. Sixteen kilobytes, a keyboard, a graphics card, and a port for a cassette recorder. With no disk in the machine you came up in BASIC out of ROM, and that was your computer for the evening. A monitor and a single floppy took it to just over three thousand. The hardware was nothing special. The 8088 was 16-bit inside and talked to everything else eight bits at a time, which was IBM taking cost out of a chip that already e