for the comp nerds among us

You're quit young, aren't you?

Remember, in 1989, most of us were working with 8MHz Amigas and STs, if we were lucky. I think I was still on an 8-bit Amstrad until 1990.

As a comparison, what's the average spec. PC these days - let's call it

2GHz. Using the same comparisons, it would be like having a 5GHz machine..... and isn't actually far of the price you'd expect to pay for something of such a comparative spec. (£4.5k in Sterling).

In 1989, 20Mhz *was* lightning fast. I bought a 25MHz 486 PC in 1995 that still cost me £700 and that was bottom of the range then.

Note that the price didn't include the monitor or mouse as a mouse was optional then.

Friend of mine bought a 486 DX50 with 8mb and a collosal 250mb hard drive in

1991 That was a real 486 DX50, not a DX2/50. It didn't have a CD Rom drive or sound card, or a modem come to think of it.

It did come with a 17" Iiyama monitor which was the forst I had ever seen.

£2,500. The bin men wouldn't even lift it from the door nowadays.

First PC I used was an Apricot with an Amber Monitor and Dos3. It was an XT spec PC not an AT, and had the luxury of 640k of ram and a

10meg HDD that was the size of a bus. That was proper luxury back then.

I had an Apricot PC Xi with10mb winchester hard drive, green screen, Dos 3.2 and 384kb of ram. Wordperfect and AsEasyAs were about all it would do. Had a 9 pin Epson dot Matrix as well. Whoulda thunk that things would have moved on so far and so fast.

Yes, well, PC nerds were behind the times. Having a monitor/card that could display more than 16 colours was also optional.

Meanwhile the more sensible ones had 24 bit colour, mouse, and an OS that didn't crash every time the wind changed direction.

ISTR that it was XEN or ZEN I had.

yeah i had an amiga which cost i dunno 300quid maybe? my mates all wanted one and i didn't see the big deal i guess at the time it was a lot of dough. i remember me and my dad putting a HDD into the amiga too a whopping 80meg! :)

just seems weird now that i have something which fits on a key chain that can hold 8gig and transfer faster through a usb port too.

we had a pentium 133mhz as our first pc in my house and we even went for a

15" monitor that was well over £1k for that.

What ones would that be then?

Dunno, in 1989 I was flying F18 jets upside down under the golden gate bridge on my Amiga and I was shooting evil snails in Rotorua with my bow and arrow, trying to get my little Kiwi buddies back.

There's bound to be an Apple product around in 1989 that did everything better though. Apparently there always is.

Except it's a non-linear scale. The 14 / 25 MHz Amiga systems were way quicker than they ought to be when compared with a typical x86 platform.

Perhaps not, because the genuine DX50 is relatively rare...

Woot!

I seem to recall I was doing something similar in the F-16 and the F-29... :)

Oh you don't mean that Apple owners were as smug then as they are now?

Don't get me wrong, I don't dislike Macs, merely the smug-factor that comes with them. For a similar reason I don't think I'll ever own a Passat. A devastatingly fast cross country missile it may be, but I dislike the smugness of the drivers. If you see what I mean. ;-)

Except that was reasonable value. My father-in-law sold machines back in the relatively early years (1989 is not all that early) and the number of people who'd buy something because it had a 386 at 16 MHz rather than a 14 MHz 286... pay the inflated price... and do nothing unusual with it.

My first office machine used a 16 MHz Genuine Intel 386SX processor and 4 Mb of RAM, because it said so on the box.

Then I was given the old server tower. 66 MHz of 486DX2 processor, five fans and a five foot high case with three hard drives in it.

My first notebook had a 286 processor, CGA video and a 387 maths co-processor. Oh and a massive 40 Mb hard drive, Windows 3.0 and DOS 6.2 (not 6.22) running DoubleSpace (not DriveSpace).

You missed the joys of the 8086 and 8088 with 640k RAM and a 10MB RLL/MFM HDD.

You were ripped off. I was building P75 systems for alot less than that.

Possibly - it was an IBM system though and came with HP colour printer and a fair bit of software.

David

I single handedly brought the middle east to its knees in an F-15.

I know someone who owns a Mac that is too fast to be used in nav rallies.

There are Passats I would own, does that make me smug?

The only justification I can think of for owning a Passat are you needed the TDI for a Ka conversion...