The Infant Moses Owned an IBM Computer. Now It’s Mine

 

“Computer user” defines the limits of my expertise. I can’t describe them with the fluency of @hankrhody. I can’t build precision electronics like @SkipSul. I can’t program them the way @judgemental or @arahant can. But people like me had an important part to play in the microcomputer revolution: We’re the suckers who paid for it, usually cheerfully. I flipped through a few quarter-century old computer magazines, noticing just how wildly expensive everything was in 1994-’97, for much less performance and far fewer capabilities than today’s computers. Still, to a non-computer specialist like me, the mid-Nineties is a world that’s almost two thirds a modern one. There were slick magazines advertising laptops and desktop machines with color monitors. Accessories like printers and modems plugged right in. The software was by then largely standardized on MS-DOS/Windows 3.1. It was already assumed that you’d want a modem for online use, although it would be for contact via plain old telephone lines with bulletin board systems, not the World Wide Web just quite yet. 1994 or so, in other words, is a primitive but recognizable world to a computer user of today.

Recently I acquired a copy of Byte Magazine from August 1982. This is a lucky find because it’s from a brief, in between period in the history of personal computers. 1982 is most of the way back to the crudely printed newsletters and bulletins of the geeky computer clubs of the Seventies, like the one in northern California that spawned Apple. This issue of Byte runs to 512 pages (!), an amount of advertising that demanded filling in with a whole bunch of dry-as-sawdust technical articles about object-oriented programming, and defining characteristics of sprites on mapped x-y coordinates. That was Byte’s readership.

There’s very little here yet about what actual end users might do with these machines. Almost every article and ad page in the 512 of them would be incomprehensibly challenging to anyone who innocently stumbled in, hoping to find out something about using computers. In the early to mid-Eighties, the only true ease-of-use was found with toy computers, the Sinclair, Commodore, Atari and ColecoVision ones you could buy for $99-$199 and hook up to your living room TV. They didn’t do much that was useful. Even the games were lame.

There are applications for sale in Byte, plenty of them, selling at jaw-dropping high prices by today’s standards, but they are either programming fragments that you have to stitch together yourself, or they’re simple turnkey packages dedicated to one purpose, like printing dry cleaning tags. Like the microcomputer newsletters of the Seventies, most of these voluminous ads are black and white, crudely hand-drawn, with a variety of cheap typefaces that would do justice to a 1950s church bulletin. Apple, as well as IBM and Microsoft,  are among the few advertisers who’d still be widely recognized today, and they have color ads (still an expensive rarity in computer mags in 1982). These ads are surprisingly ordinary-looking, not that different than nearby pages for Ashton-Tate’s dBASE.

I attended the second Applefest in Boston, May 14-16, 1982. Some friends of mine worked for a new magazine, Softalk, so I had a floor pass. The two Steves were still doing their buddy act at the conference, but almost everyone at the show skipped the Friday night opening in favor of the premiere of “Conan the Barbarian”. It was quite a weekend. Across the street from the Hynes Center, a giant Jolly Roger fluttered in the wind, marking the Pirate’s Convention.

At Applefest, voice I/O system cards and magnetic storage media were all the rage that spring. 1982 was a peculiar half-and-half era, feminism-wise. The term “sexism” had already been in use for a dozen or so years. Women were already writing software for micros and running start-up companies. Yet even in liberal Boston, an Eighties computer show was also full of “booth babes”, like the young women who pose at auto shows. One group of models wore tight t-shirts that proclaimed “We’ve Got the Best Twin Floppies in Town!”. Undeniably eye-catching but rather crass. But another, more subtle approach worked better with this crowd: a booth of nice, but normal-looking women giving away shirts that merely promised “No Bad Memories”–a romantic ideal that both sides can agree on.

There’s an amazing variety of vendors of products that few people in today’s world have ever had to buy. In ’82, regardless of who you bought from, you probably had a green-and-black or orange-and-black monitor and not much to do with it. You couldn’t just plug a computer into a printer. Usually, you needed an add-on circuit card that had to be configured via tiny rocker switches to run with your specific computer and your printer, each end of which could be almost impossible to straighten out. Speaking of printing, a far-from-exotic business necessity, if you didn’t want your expensive machine to come to a stuttering halt while it printed things out, you needed a print buffer, a costly block of outboard memory that accepted full files from the computer and doled them out to the printer, a little bit at a time.

But then, the outlay didn’t seem like all that big a deal when your printer already cost you $1300, and your computer $3000. That $4300 starter system would be about $11,292 in today’s money. To add insult to financial injury, the computers you bought for that kind of money were no great shakes, and that wouldn’t even have included the main software you’d want to make the thing minimally useful. For example, the first really successful word processing software for microcomputers was WordStar. At a hefty $400; say a thousand bucks in 2019.

Another approach to personal computing was briefly popular. The Kaypro and Osborne computers were similar packages–a (damn heavy!) “portable” computer with a built-in monochrome monitor, two floppy disk drives, and—the dealmaker!—a library of name-brand business software guaranteed to run. Both companies were too small and ill-managed to survive, but they had a great idea for making computing as non-threatening and worry-free as possible 35 years ago. For $1795, either company gave you a complete package that you didn’t have to be a computer hobbyist to use. My own office was first equipped with Kaypros, which became a great Hollywood favorite. Arthur C. Clarke and Peter Hyams used it to send each other overnight drafts of the script to “2010: The Year We Make Contact”. William F. Buckley liked his Kaypro so much he did all his writing on it almost to the end of his life.

The IBM AT series and Apple’s Macintosh would appear in 1984. That generation of the personal computer would grow over the years into being a powerful step up in usefulness, as well as ease of use. But it took time. Alfred Sloan, the longtime chairman of General Motors during its glory days, confessed in his memoirs that the unsung hero of early automobiling was the patient, long-suffering customer, who paid for the progress we all benefit from now. Personal computers were no different.

I owe you an explanation about baby Moses’s very own IBM computer and how it ended up in my hands. Here it is: Charlton Heston was one of the most influential of trustees of the American Film Institute. Like a number of other industry big shots, like Ray Stark and Jerry Weintraub, he donated filmmaking gear and then-current office equipment to AFI. One batch from the Hestons included a few family-owned personal computers, still very expensive at the time.

AFI had just received a massive grant from Apple, both in cash and in-kind contributions, and one requirement was Appletalk wiring and an all-Apple AFI campus. That meant they couldn’t use donated IBM computers anymore, so they quietly asked a few people if they had use for them. I walked away with Fraser Heston’s 1983-vintage XT, a big heavy thing with two hard drives and two floppy disc drives.

Fraser had been pressed into service in 1956 to play his own father as a baby in Cecil B. de Mille’s “The Ten Commandments”. And that’s how come I have Moses’s computer in my storeroom.

Published in General
This post was promoted to the Main Feed by a Ricochet Editor at the recommendation of Ricochet members. Like this post? Want to comment? Join Ricochet’s community of conservatives and be part of the conversation. Join Ricochet for Free.

There are 105 comments.

Become a member to join the conversation. Or sign in if you're already a member.
  1. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    I remember when a “Fat Mac”meant it had 512 K. When the upper limit of MS DOS was 640 K, it once seemed tremendous. 

    • #61
  2. cirby Inactive
    cirby
    @cirby

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    I remember when a “Fat Mac”meant it had 512 K. When the upper limit of MS DOS was 640 K, it once seemed tremendous.

    And that was just the upper limit. Most of the DOS machines you’d find in stores topped out at 64K or 128K. A fancy PC would have 256K.

    • #62
  3. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    cirby (View Comment):

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    I remember when a “Fat Mac”meant it had 512 K. When the upper limit of MS DOS was 640 K, it once seemed tremendous.

    And that was just the upper limit. Most of the DOS machines you’d find in stores topped out at 64K or 128K. A fancy PC would have 256K.

    The added RAM meant vastly faster handling of programs that liked to drag in whole libraries of side info, and there seemed to be more and more of them. 

    Whatever system you had, the addition of a hard drive generally felt like the transition between propeller planes and jets. Everything was not only faster, but smoother. There were fewer maddeningly unpredictable slowdowns for disc loads/unloads. But man, like everything else we talked about here, it cost you. Even in the late Eighties the price of a “Winchester” (the shotgun nickname because of its 30-30 configuration: thirty tracks, thirty sectors) external hard drive was about $300 for 30 mgs, and seemed like a great bargain. 

    • #63
  4. She Member
    She
    @She

    cirby (View Comment):

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    I remember when a “Fat Mac”meant it had 512 K. When the upper limit of MS DOS was 640 K, it once seemed tremendous.

    And that was just the upper limit. Most of the DOS machines you’d find in stores topped out at 64K or 128K. A fancy PC would have 256K.

    That (and five other reasons) is why the AST Six-Pack was invented.  

    Having nasty frissons for the first time in decades about trying to explain the difference between extended and expanded memory . . . .

    • #64
  5. She Member
    She
    @She

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    I remember when a “Fat Mac”meant it had 512 K. When the upper limit of MS DOS was 640 K, it once seemed tremendous.

    Another unpleasant blast from my days in sales during the early and halcyon days of the PC revolution (1983-1986).  We had a dedicated rep for Apple sales (she sold almost exclusively to schools) and Apple had almost no presence in the corporate market anyway, except for the evolving Pagemaker niche.  So, with one exception, I had very little to do with Apple.

    The one exception was Robert Anderson, CEO of Rockwell International.  Rockwell, headquartered in Pittsburgh at the time, was my account, and I sold PC/XTs and ATs to them, sometimes dozens at a time.  (Unlike a couple of my other accounts, Rockwell was Big Blue all the way).

    But Mr. Anderson had his own personal Macintosh, which he took everywhere with him, including the jet on which he frequently traveled between Pittsburgh and El Segundo.

    And when he wanted to do some work on these trips, he wanted access to his company’s data, but he wanted it on his Mac.  (A virtual impossibility (so to speak) at the time.)

    Until someone came up with one of the worst products ever invented:

    Basically, it was a PC-in-a-box (cost about as much as a PC, too) which hung off the side of the Mac.  Everything was communicated over a serial  cable to the Mac’s serial port, which crippled the blazing speed of the 8088 in the MacCharlie even more than usual.  It also came with a keyboard surround (which you can see in the photo) for the Mac’s keyboard, adding the PC function keys and number pad.

    I don’t think very many were sold.  Maybe just one . . . 

    • #65
  6. Randy Webster Inactive
    Randy Webster
    @RandyWebster

    Gary McVey (View Comment):
    external hard drive was about $300 for 30 mgs, and seemed like a great bargain. 

    I paid $500 for a numeric co-processor for a 386.

    • #66
  7. Stad Coolidge
    Stad
    @Stad

    Percival (View Comment):

    Aaron Miller (View Comment):

    Now tell us again how Moses parted the C.

    He parsed the C. Then he compiled it.

    This is Basic stuff . . .

    • #67
  8. Stad Coolidge
    Stad
    @Stad

    Randy Webster (View Comment):

    James Gawron (View Comment):

    Gary McVey:

    AFI had just received a massive grant from Apple, both in cash and in-kind contributions, and one requirement was Appletalk wiring and an all-Apple AFI campus. That meant they couldn’t use donated IBM computers anymore, so they quietly asked a few people if they had use for them. I walked away with Fraser Heston’s 1983-vintage XT, a big heavy thing with two hard drives and two floppy disc drives.

    Fraser had been pressed into service in 1956 to play his own father as a baby in Cecil B. de Mille’s “The Ten Commandments”. And that’s how come I have Moses’s computer in my storeroom.

    Gary,

    You old dog you! Damn, you really do have Moses’ pc. In honor of this fact, I will now give you my lecture on backward compatibility. The original IBM pc (including the slightly more powerful XT) used an 8086 intel processor. The 8086 was an 8-bit processor with a 16-bit data bus. The IBM-AT was the next model and it used the 80286 processor a full 16-bit processor. The AT could be used in 8086 emulation mode. This meant that if you had software that was written for the original PC and data disks that you have made with that software, you could boot it up, as is, onto your AT in emulation mode. This was and still is called backward compatibility. Although I don’t have a 5″ floppy drive on my 7i pc running Windows 10 at home, I could get a 5″ drive on the net for under $10. The drive would plug right into my case and take the existing data cable and power cable hookups already there. I could then get into 8086 emulation mode and boot up software written for Moses’ computer and use it to edit data disks made at that time. In other words, after 36 years I would not have lost one byte of data or been locked out of a piece of software that I had learned to use. That’s backward compatibility!!

     

    Wouldn’t you have to buy a floppy controller?

    Cue the “hard drive” joke . . .

    • #68
  9. She Member
    She
    @She

    Stad (View Comment):

    Percival (View Comment):

    Aaron Miller (View Comment):

    Now tell us again how Moses parted the C.

    He parsed the C. Then he compiled it.

    This is Basic stuff . . .

    A Perl of wisdom.  Please don’t Forth any more on us.  (Thorry, I have a Lisp today.)

    • #69
  10. SkipSul Inactive
    SkipSul
    @skipsul

    Hank Rhody, Drunk on Power (View Comment):

    Percival (View Comment):

    Aaron Miller (View Comment):

    Now tell us again how Moses parted the C.

    He parsed the C. Then he compiled it.

    This is also the Sean Connery version of the scene.

    • #70
  11. SkipSul Inactive
    SkipSul
    @skipsul

    She (View Comment):
    Another unpleasant blast from my days in sales during the early and halcyon days of the PC revolution (1983-1986). We had a dedicated rep for Apple sales (she sold almost exclusively to schools) and Apple had almost no presence in the corporate market anyway, except for the evolving Pagemaker niche. So, with one exception, I had very little to do with Apple.

    My father’s first successful business invested heavily in computers for accounting, CAD, and sundry other work.  He looked hard at Apple at the time, but not only were they at the high end of the price market, they wouldn’t negotiate over anything.  Fixed price sheet, not matter how large a purchase you were looking at.  No company discounts, no volume discounts, nada.  People forget just why Intel / MS gained such market dominance at that time – they were flat out easier to deal with.

    • #71
  12. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    She (View Comment):

    Stad (View Comment):

    Percival (View Comment):

    Aaron Miller (View Comment):

    Now tell us again how Moses parted the C.

    He parsed the C. Then he compiled it.

    This is Basic stuff . . .

    A Perl of wisdom. Please don’t Forth any more on us. (Thorry, I have a Lisp today.)

    This is starting to read like a Python skit.

    • #72
  13. Hank Rhody, Drunk on Power Contributor
    Hank Rhody, Drunk on Power
    @HankRhody

    She (View Comment):

    Stad (View Comment):

    Percival (View Comment):

    Aaron Miller (View Comment):

    Now tell us again how Moses parted the C.

    He parsed the C. Then he compiled it.

    This is Basic stuff . . .

    A Perl of wisdom. Please don’t Forth any more on us. (Thorry, I have a Lisp today.)

    Alright, alright, cut the Eddie Haskell act.

    • #73
  14. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    I remember MacCharlie. Dayna was a big maker of drives back then. Any youg’uns reading this should know that IBM licensed the Little Tramp character from the Chaplin estate and branded their new PC “A Tool For Modern Times”. 

    I had an external HD for a Mac that used a thick SCSI (“scuzzy”) connector and made trundling sounds for about a half minute before it would boot. 

    Apple commercials of the mid to late Eighties often featured buttoned-down, uptight CEO types discovering that this so-called toy from Apple was a “serious business computer”. 

    • #74
  15. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    SkipSul (View Comment):

    She (View Comment):
    Another unpleasant blast from my days in sales during the early and halcyon days of the PC revolution (1983-1986). We had a dedicated rep for Apple sales (she sold almost exclusively to schools) and Apple had almost no presence in the corporate market anyway, except for the evolving Pagemaker niche. So, with one exception, I had very little to do with Apple.

    My father’s first successful business invested heavily in computers for accounting, CAD, and sundry other work. He looked hard at Apple at the time, but not only were they at the high end of the price market, they wouldn’t negotiate over anything. Fixed price sheet, not matter how large a purchase you were looking at. No company discounts, no volume discounts, nada. People forget just why Intel / MS gained such market dominance at that time – they were flat out easier to deal with.

    Apple’s slogan was “A Computer For the Rest of Us”.  Then and now, many have asked, “So why does it have to cost three times as much as the computer for the rest of them?”

    • #75
  16. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    James Gawron (View Comment):

    Gary McVey:

    AFI had just received a massive grant from Apple, both in cash and in-kind contributions, and one requirement was Appletalk wiring and an all-Apple AFI campus. That meant they couldn’t use donated IBM computers anymore, so they quietly asked a few people if they had use for them. I walked away with Fraser Heston’s 1983-vintage XT, a big heavy thing with two hard drives and two floppy disc drives.

     

    Fraser had been pressed into service in 1956 to play his own father as a baby in Cecil B. de Mille’s “The Ten Commandments”. And that’s how come I have Moses’s computer in my storeroom.

    Gary,

    You old dog you! Damn, you really do have Moses’ pc. In honor of this fact, I will now give you my lecture on backward compatibility.

    Jim, you tell a great story on that! But as an old TV guy, I can claim there’s one thing harder than backwards compatibility, and that’s forward compatibility. Not only did 1954’s new color TVs have to receive a black and white picture, but (this was the hard part) the old black and white TVs had to receive the color signal and present it in black and white. They hid the color “information” so effectively that the old sets didn’t “know” the difference. 

     

    • #76
  17. SkipSul Inactive
    SkipSul
    @skipsul

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    SkipSul (View Comment):

    She (View Comment):
    Another unpleasant blast from my days in sales during the early and halcyon days of the PC revolution (1983-1986). We had a dedicated rep for Apple sales (she sold almost exclusively to schools) and Apple had almost no presence in the corporate market anyway, except for the evolving Pagemaker niche. So, with one exception, I had very little to do with Apple.

    My father’s first successful business invested heavily in computers for accounting, CAD, and sundry other work. He looked hard at Apple at the time, but not only were they at the high end of the price market, they wouldn’t negotiate over anything. Fixed price sheet, not matter how large a purchase you were looking at. No company discounts, no volume discounts, nada. People forget just why Intel / MS gained such market dominance at that time – they were flat out easier to deal with.

    Apple’s slogan was “A Computer For the Rest of Us”. Then and now, many have asked, “So why does it have to cost three times as much as the computer for the rest of them?”

    And that remained true for a very long time too, which, when you factored in the compatibility gulf too, always kept them a bit player (no pun intended).

    Today, Apple computers are still at the high end of the price market, but they’re well made and I’ve come to vastly prefer their UI and overall OS design (neither of which are prone to massive and fundamental design shifts every design cycle) to Windows (Microsoft seems hell-bent on hiding more and more of itself out of your reach, while bundling in advertisments and bloatware right into the OS).  And yet, if you spec out a high end computer from another maker, you’re basically in the same price realm as Apple, so they’re not as outlandish as they once were, and the compatibility gulf between Apple and Windows is much narrower (and much less important) than it was 20 years ago.  

    • #77
  18. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    One of the selling points of the Atari ST was it had a Motorola processor like the Macintosh and the GEM graphics environment, but it read and stored data in an IBM/Microsoft compatible format. With the right set of applications, it was the best of both worlds, at least at that low price point. 

    Backstory: Holocaust survivor Jack Tramiel founded Commodore and eventually bought its rival, Atari. Hence the Atari ST was nicknamed the “Jackintosh”.  

    • #78
  19. James Gawron Inactive
    James Gawron
    @JamesGawron

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    SkipSul (View Comment):

    She (View Comment):
    Another unpleasant blast from my days in sales during the early and halcyon days of the PC revolution (1983-1986). We had a dedicated rep for Apple sales (she sold almost exclusively to schools) and Apple had almost no presence in the corporate market anyway, except for the evolving Pagemaker niche. So, with one exception, I had very little to do with Apple.

    My father’s first successful business invested heavily in computers for accounting, CAD, and sundry other work. He looked hard at Apple at the time, but not only were they at the high end of the price market, they wouldn’t negotiate over anything. Fixed price sheet, not matter how large a purchase you were looking at. No company discounts, no volume discounts, nada. People forget just why Intel / MS gained such market dominance at that time – they were flat out easier to deal with.

    Apple’s slogan was “A Computer For the Rest of Us”. Then and now, many have asked, “So why does it have to cost three times as much as the computer for the rest of them?”

    Gary,

    Apple is still getting away with murder. The current iPhones are over $1,000.00. However, even the tech guy at the Wall Street Journal (you’d think they’d have the cash to buy an iPhone) has just done a review of android phones under $400. He thinks people ought to take a look.

    Regards,

    Jim

    • #79
  20. SkipSul Inactive
    SkipSul
    @skipsul

    James Gawron (View Comment):

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    SkipSul (View Comment):

    She (View Comment):
    Another unpleasant blast from my days in sales during the early and halcyon days of the PC revolution (1983-1986). We had a dedicated rep for Apple sales (she sold almost exclusively to schools) and Apple had almost no presence in the corporate market anyway, except for the evolving Pagemaker niche. So, with one exception, I had very little to do with Apple.

    My father’s first successful business invested heavily in computers for accounting, CAD, and sundry other work. He looked hard at Apple at the time, but not only were they at the high end of the price market, they wouldn’t negotiate over anything. Fixed price sheet, not matter how large a purchase you were looking at. No company discounts, no volume discounts, nada. People forget just why Intel / MS gained such market dominance at that time – they were flat out easier to deal with.

    Apple’s slogan was “A Computer For the Rest of Us”. Then and now, many have asked, “So why does it have to cost three times as much as the computer for the rest of them?”

    Gary,

    Apple is still getting away with murder. The current iPhones are over $1,000.00. However, even the tech guy at the Wall Street Journal (you’d think they’d have the cash to buy an iPhone) has just done a review of android phones under $400. He thinks people ought to take a look.

    Regards,

    Jim

    Not true.  Sure, you can spend over a grand if you bought the top of the line specced out whizbang model, but their entry-level phones are $449 right now.

    • #80
  21. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    One thing we glossed over was how crummy 40 column text was. An ordinary TV couldn’t display anything finer, and it obviously made WYSIWYG text editing hard if not impossible. Plenty of us had switches between color and B+W monitors to toggle between writing and games. 

    Black and white? I should say “monochrome”, because few monitors were “paper white”. Funny how that worked; most of us had, not that long ago, gotten rid of monochrome TVs in favor of color. That’s why the greatly sharper graphics available on the 286s (and later, on the color Macs) was so remarkable: it was the first high definition color picture most of us had ever seen. You could actually read the small print. 

    When I was a kid, the term “wireless”, meaning radio, was beyond ancient. Then when radio data came in, it was called…wireless. My kids will call something “wireless streaming video”. We just called it television. 

    The coolest phonograph equipment you could by in 1957 was called “high fidelity”. The term became a total anachronism in the age of stereo. Then when Sony needed a new term to describe SuperBeta’s ultra-good stereo sound, they called it…high fidelity.  

    • #81
  22. She Member
    She
    @She

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    I remember MacCharlie.

    You geezer, you.

     

    • #82
  23. Gary McVey Contributor
    Gary McVey
    @GaryMcVey

    She (View Comment):

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    I remember MacCharlie.

    You geezer, you.

     

    Here’s a picture of me talking with Pocahontas:

    • #83
  24. James Gawron Inactive
    James Gawron
    @JamesGawron

    SkipSul (View Comment):

    James Gawron (View Comment):

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    SkipSul (View Comment):

    She (View Comment):
    Another unpleasant blast from my days in sales during the early and halcyon days of the PC revolution (1983-1986). We had a dedicated rep for Apple sales (she sold almost exclusively to schools) and Apple had almost no presence in the corporate market anyway, except for the evolving Pagemaker niche. So, with one exception, I had very little to do with Apple.

    My father’s first successful business invested heavily in computers for accounting, CAD, and sundry other work. He looked hard at Apple at the time, but not only were they at the high end of the price market, they wouldn’t negotiate over anything. Fixed price sheet, not matter how large a purchase you were looking at. No company discounts, no volume discounts, nada. People forget just why Intel / MS gained such market dominance at that time – they were flat out easier to deal with.

    Apple’s slogan was “A Computer For the Rest of Us”. Then and now, many have asked, “So why does it have to cost three times as much as the computer for the rest of them?”

    Gary,

    Apple is still getting away with murder. The current iPhones are over $1,000.00. However, even the tech guy at the Wall Street Journal (you’d think they’d have the cash to buy an iPhone) has just done a review of android phones under $400. He thinks people ought to take a look.

    Regards,

    Jim

    Not true. Sure, you can spend over a grand if you bought the top of the line specced out whizbang model, but their entry-level phones are $449 right now.

    Skip,

    Funny, the Wall Street Journal guy didn’t think that your entry-level apple even worth the time to look at. They are selling a phone for $449 that you could have for $175 elsewhere. You’ve got to compare apples to apples or actually apples to non-apples.

    Regards,

    Jim

    • #84
  25. She Member
    She
    @She

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    One of the selling points of the Atari ST was it had a Motorola processor like the Macintosh and the GEM graphics environment, but it read and stored data in an IBM/Microsoft compatible format. With the right set of applications, it was the best of both worlds, at least at that low price point.

    Backstory: Holocaust survivor Jack Tramiel founded Commodore and eventually bought its rival, Atari. Hence the Atari ST was nicknamed the “Jackintosh”.

    I have a couple of Atari STs lying around. We were an Atari family (started with the 400, for which I fiddled and soldered to create an external “real” keyboard).  Had a Rana disk drive, and a bunch of other stuff.  Mr. She wrote a couple of programs (Player/Missile graphics!) for games that could be played by kids with limited physical mobility.  Loved “Star Raiders.”  Loved the “Video Easel” fractal graphics cartridge most of all.  Had a couple of “illicit for the time” programs given to us by the local games store, just before things went south, including Ball Blaster (not what you may think) and a game whose name I can’t remember, but it was astronauts landing on a planet and escaping from their spaceship.  

    It’s been a few years since I played “Apple Panic” and “Pooyan,” after hooking the unit up to the only monitor I have that still has the right hookups, but you’ve inspired me!  Will get them out in the next couple of weeks and report back.

    I remember Jack Tramiel.  And we were members of the local Pittsburgh Atari Computer Enthusiasts (PACE) Group.  Lots of (gentle and kind) whackos in it.  I miss that.

     

    • #85
  26. SkipSul Inactive
    SkipSul
    @skipsul

    James Gawron (View Comment):

    kip,

    Funny, the Wall Street Journal guy didn’t think that your entry-level apple even worth the time to look at. They are selling a phone for $449 that you could have for $175 elsewhere. You’ve got to compare apples to apples or actually apples to non-apples.

    Regards,

    Jim

    It’s a paywalled article, so whatever the WSJ guy thinks is (quite literally) beyond my scope.

    Don’t know what he has to complain about, but I suppose it’s a matter of how you use your phone, and what for.  I doubt he’d be at all pleased with what my 8 year old laptop can do either, except I’m not using it for what he would use it for.  And it’s the same with cell phones.  I’ve got a 3 1/2 year old cell phone that still competently does everything I want it to do, so spending $400 on a new phone at this point is rather outrageous.  It’s all a matter of perspective.

    Just speaking personally, though, I would never willingly buy an Android phone just because of the way Google monetizes and subsidizes them – they’re basically portable surveillance devices for Google advertising.

    • #86
  27. Hank Rhody, Drunk on Power Contributor
    Hank Rhody, Drunk on Power
    @HankRhody

    SkipSul (View Comment):
    Just speaking personally, though, I would never willingly buy an Android phone just because of the way Google monetizes and subsidizes them – they’re basically portable surveillance devices for Google advertising.

    What a curious game. The only winning move is not to play.

    • #87
  28. Randy Webster Inactive
    Randy Webster
    @RandyWebster

    SkipSul (View Comment):
    Just speaking personally, though, I would never willingly buy an Android phone just because of the way Google monetizes and subsidizes them – they’re basically portable surveillance devices for Google advertising.

    Is removing the battery the only way to really turn them off?

    • #88
  29. James Gawron Inactive
    James Gawron
    @JamesGawron

    SkipSul (View Comment):

    James Gawron (View Comment):

    kip,

    Funny, the Wall Street Journal guy didn’t think that your entry-level apple even worth the time to look at. They are selling a phone for $449 that you could have for $175 elsewhere. You’ve got to compare apples to apples or actually apples to non-apples.

    Regards,

    Jim

    It’s a paywalled article, so whatever the WSJ guy thinks is (quite literally) beyond my scope.

    Don’t know what he has to complain about, but I suppose it’s a matter of how you use your phone, and what for. I doubt he’d be at all pleased with what my 8 year old laptop can do either, except I’m not using it for what he would use it for. And it’s the same with cell phones. I’ve got a 3 1/2 year old cell phone that still competently does everything I want it to do, so spending $400 on a new phone at this point is rather outrageous. It’s all a matter of perspective.

    Just speaking personally, though, I would never willingly buy an Android phone just because of the way Google monetizes and subsidizes them – they’re basically portable surveillance devices for Google advertising.

    Skip,

    I agree with you about this problem. However, considering all of the other hype from Apple over the years, I really don’t believe them when it comes to non-surveillance. The reason you know all about Google is that with Android, an open operating system, it really is very difficult for them to hide. However, Apple controls the operating system too. I doubt taking their word for it is worth a thing and it is much more difficult to catch them if they cheat.

    You are paying 3 times as much for an illusion. Of course, people like their illusions and are happy to pay for them.

    Regards,

    Jim

    PS: on the WSJ article, just watch the video. It’s not behind the paywall.

    • #89
  30. James Gawron Inactive
    James Gawron
    @JamesGawron

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    She (View Comment):

    Gary McVey (View Comment):

    I remember MacCharlie.

    You geezer, you.

     

    Here’s a picture of me talking with Pocahontas:

    Gary,

    I thought you wouldn’t be caught dead talking to Elizabeth Warren. Oh, you mean the original Pocahontas. Cute girl. You old devil you.

    Regards,

    Jim

    • #90
Become a member to join the conversation. Or sign in if you're already a member.