A blast from the past

[Nitro]

I ran across an online Radio Shack catalog archive that holds all of the catalogs ever published.
There were taken from a 1980 printing.

 

[Beguiling Orbit]

In today's dollars, that TRS-80 Model II would cost $10,414.06!

 

[Beguiling Orbit]

Something else I noticed: The "over 6000 sales outlets" mentioned in the ad? There are now only 72 company-owned and 500 dealer-owned Radio Shack stores open (as of June 2017). Depending on whether you count the independent stores, that's a 90% or 99% decline. Talk about a massive inability to adapt to change!

 

[Judge]

Funny to recall the early 80s in terms of how I didn't relate at all to home computing. Thought it was as a stupid notion. Why would anyone want to bring their work home with them? Yeah, me who went to work in front of a proprietary IBM computer terminal in 1981. I even used to laugh at my brother endlessly puttering around with his tape-driven Commodore 64.

When I did eventually buy my first computer around 1988, it was strictly a toy to me. Never intended to use it in conjunction with work. A mentality that only lasted about three years. It was buying a game (Lucasarts Battle of Britain) which didn't work that gave me the incentive to learn the operating system, so I could customize the config.sys and autoexec.bat files to finally run the game and further hack the DOS GUI that came with the computer. Eventually I started making hardware modifications, increasing my RAM to a whopping 3MB and swapping the CPU for a Cyrix chip that essentially changed my 286 into a 386.

It was all so much fun back then. More so in 1992 when this weird GUI product came out called Microsoft Windows 3.1. Computer nostalgia for me? All those trips to the local "Egghead" stores to shop for so much Windows software I didn't really need. Man I miss that era of computing.

And yeah, trips to the local Radio Shack were always of a very practical nature. Buy heavier gauge speaker wire, or hard-to-find RCA jacks and converters. Even a few computer peripherals. Until Frys Electronics came to town...a sort of "Disneyland" for geeks. Then Radio Shack became a non-issue.

I'm still trying to recall what I paid for my first dot-matrix printer from Epson. But...lol....it wasn't $1999!

 

[Mia]

I still have half a box of paper left from an old line (pinhole) printer, that I use to sketch on. One of my first office jobs had my boss using something similar to the trs 80 (don't remember what it was it may have been a commodore). I took to it so readily that my boss let me fool around with it on my breaks and lunch hour. After awhile I was showing him, rather than the other way around. And I began to do some of the accounting for the company.

There was a small video rental place near where I lived, back in the day, that also rented software which I rented and installed on my own system eventually. It was an adventure and still is.

 

[Judge]

Remember the racket a dot-matrix printer made whenever you printed those primitive computer graphics? Oh my...I could hardly deal with that high pitched grinding sound that took an eternity to print!

 

[Mia]

I could hardly deal with that high pitched grinding sound that took an eternity to print!

The sound, and how long it took used to drive me mad. The printouts were rarely easy to look at, so pale. Wasted so much paper too.

 

[Nitro]

I remember getting box upon box of dot matrix printing paper we used for scrap paper as a kid.

 

[Judge]

I remember just giving my dot matrix away to a friend's son once I bought my first HP Laser Printer. Quiet, quick and printed flawlessly. And the toner cartridges lasted years. But it only printed at 300 DPI. The next one I bought printed at 1200 DPI. And I'm still using that one right now...though HP in their infinite wisdom chose to dumb down the DPI to 600 for their Windows 7 driver. Ugh. Though still perfectly acceptable for business documents.

 

[Beguiling Orbit]

Remember the racket a dot-matrix printer made whenever you printed those primitive computer graphics? Oh my...I could hardly deal with that high pitched grinding sound that took an eternity to print!

Yep. I worked for a company that printed massive sales reports on one. The printing lasted all day, every day. One day I got moved to a desk that was right next to that awful, noisy printer. After I complained, they moved me around a couple of times, but by then they were preparing to fire me. That happened soon thereafter.

 

[OkRad]

Holy mac! <---pun

Look what $1000 can get you now!

Handheld device sequences human genome

 

[Judge]

My first computer. Must have paid around $1000 for it including the monitor.

 

[Beguiling Orbit]

My family's 1st computer, a TI-99/4A, when I was a kid. Look at those keyboard overlays!

 

[Nitro]

Considering that a base priced Chevrolet Impala was $5,828 in 1979,$5898 for this computer and a printer kind of puts it all in perspective as to what this rig was worth back then.

 

[Mia]

I'll never forget the sound:

 

[Judge]

I'll never forget the sound:

Quick! Someone shoot it to put it out of its misery!

 

[Butterfly88]

Nice, thanks for sharing. That was before my time but cool to look at.

 

[Judge]

My first computer was an Epson Apex with a CGA monitor and an Epson 9-pin dot matrix printer. The whole setup cost something like $3500 in 1989:

Couldn't help but notice your computer came with Xtree. So did mine. I loved that program. Helped me to learn DOS that much faster. Then my cousin gave me a copy of Xtree Gold...even better. Nice memories.

 

[Judge]

Actually, that's just a picture of what it looked like. The system I had came with First Choice and a couple other little programs. I recall having to put the DOS disk in one drive and the program in the other. Then if I wanted to save data I had to shuffle the disks around. I'd love to see some kids today try to operate one of those old, slow beasts.

Mine actually came with a 20 MB hard drive plus a 5.25 and 3.5 disk drives on a 286 platform. Not quite as slow. But then in those days we were pushing a fraction of data compared to what we're all running right now.

LOL....could have been worse thinking of my brother using a tape drive with his Commodore.

20 MB hard drive....that's about the equivalent of four record albums on MP3 format.

 

[FreeDiver]

ROFL!!! Oh yeah, I recall those old Commodores with the tape drive. It's amazing the stuff we did on those old machines.

Ya! that's all we could afford back then was a tape drive. Considering that a single floppy disk drive cost more than the computer itself. You had to be rich to own one of those, and even then, you were still a minority.