Vintage computer ads that show how far we’ve progressed, 1970-1990

https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/vintage-computer-ads/

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The other day I sat next to a woman who has a profound fear of flying. I wanted to comfort her, so I said, "Don't worry, we're not gonna' crash. Statistically, we got a better chance of being bitten by a shark." Then I showed her the scar on my elbow from a shark attack. I said, "I got this when my plane went down off of Florida." - Dennis Regan

In 1986, my family had an IBM PC AT running at 12Mhz with a 30Mb HD, 1Mb of RAM, dual floppy drives, 12" NEC multi sync color Monitor with VGA Graphics card, and a Roland DG pen-plotter.
Wayyyyyyyyyy beyond anything anyone in my high school had.
The closest anyone had was a 1.2Mhz Macintosh.
Classmates that were not even friends wanted to stop by just to see it.
One was amazed it booted up without using the floppy drive.
The computers in the high school computer lab were lousy Apple IIe units.
My home computer had spreadsheet software before most even knew what a spreadsheet was.
My girlfriend at the time learned AutoCAD 9 on it before most colleges had CAD software. She used it for high school drafting and CAD projects. Her high school allowed her to complete drafting projects on a computer but mine did not.
It played all the "commercial grade" arcade games way beyond any home video game system.

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When in doubt, WHACK the GAS and DITCH the brake !!!

Yes, there is such a thing as NORMAL, if you have to ask what is "NORMAL" , you probably aren't !
Failure may not be an OPTION, but it is ALWAYS a POSSIBILITY.
ALL systems are GO for MAYHEM, CHAOS, TURMOIL, FIASCOS, and HAVOC !

I remember about that time or so if a computer had more than a 20mb hard drive, that was a pretty decent size hard drive. I recall around ‘87 when I was able to get 4mb of RAM into my Mac SE at work and run MultiFinder, I felt I had moved into the big time!

Boy, have things changed since those days!

Earl

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Earl L. Cagle, Jr.
NAR# 29523
TRA# 962
SAM# 73
Owner/Producer
Point 39 Productions

Rocket-Brained Since 1970

I also remember back in 1986 that computer cost was $4800.00 in 1986 dollars.
That's like spending about $15,000 on a computer now, which NOBODY DOES.
To say I was thankful when my Dad bought it is a massive understatement.
Mom grudgingly went along with the purchase, although she never used it.
I was a junior in HS then and it really was "state of the art". Within a year we expanded it to 4Mb of RAM.
Now even the most basic smartphones put that to shame.

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When in doubt, WHACK the GAS and DITCH the brake !!!

Yes, there is such a thing as NORMAL, if you have to ask what is "NORMAL" , you probably aren't !
Failure may not be an OPTION, but it is ALWAYS a POSSIBILITY.
ALL systems are GO for MAYHEM, CHAOS, TURMOIL, FIASCOS, and HAVOC !

All about the Soviet mainframe situation versus the US.

RYAD - The Soviet attempt to clone the IBM S/360

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W14kh9_wMo0

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The other day I sat next to a woman who has a profound fear of flying. I wanted to comfort her, so I said, "Don't worry, we're not gonna' crash. Statistically, we got a better chance of being bitten by a shark." Then I showed her the scar on my elbow from a shark attack. I said, "I got this when my plane went down off of Florida." - Dennis Regan

My best friend growing up was a couple years older than me. His first PC was a clone from Leading Edge with two 5.25" floppies, 12" amber monochrome monitor, and I believe was an 8088 CPU. I don't recall it having a hard drive, nor do I remember how much ram it had. I can't remember which version of DOS he had. Probably 2.0.

Remember those 2" thick Computer Shopper magazines in the late 80's? My first computer came out of that. It was several years after my friend got his. Mine was a PC clone 80386-SX 16Mhz, with 5.25", 3.5", 1mb ram, a 65mb RLL Seagate hard disk, and a 14" interlaced SVGA monitor. I think it came with DOS 4.0, but it may have been 3.3. Considering we all shared MS DOS and DR DOS upgrades, I can't really remember what all I used on it. I only bought one desktop computer after that, a 60Mhz Pentium that still had separate Dos 5.5 or 6 and Windows 3.0 software. 3.0 sucked, so I recall using XTree Gold instead, but Win 3.3 was a vast improvement. After that I started building my own. I mostly did AMD K6 and K7 stuff and some Celerons, and overclocking the snot out of them, but later went back to Intel with mild overclocking. I did have an AMD Phenom II before my current i7 system. It's all fast enough now that I haven't bothered to overclock my current setup.

Going back to my middle and high school days, I remember the Sinclair ads where you hooked it to the TV and used a cassette tape for storage. I almost talked my parents into getting one. I was glad we didn't after getting to do some some programming on an Apple II in a summer program at my high school.

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I love sanding.