In the year 2015, we have access to never known before computing power for our spending dollar.
You have processors that are measured in gigahertz and hard drives measured in terabytes.
Further, you have straight out of science fiction display technologies available these days.
The Programma was sort of a supercalculator that could add, subtract, multiply, and divide large numbers.
To plan the Apollo 11 moon landing, several of these machines were bought by NASA.
This was perhaps one of the first portable computers that mainly targeted scientists.
The top-end 64KB model had a list price of $19,975 (i.e.
$88,000 today).
It could output 16 lines of text on the display along with 64 characters each.
The quarter-inch cartridge tape drive could store 204KB.
Cromemco System Three (1979)
It was founded by two Stanford doctoral students.
NASA and U.S. Air Force were early adopters of this option.
It was a top-end configuration that boasted of a 5MB external hard drive and 512KB of RAM.
System Three could run both Fortran IV and Z80 Basic.
The companys Cromix was the first Unix-like OS available for microcomputer systems.
The listing price was $12,495 in 1979, which is around $36,000 today.
It was successfully marketed to the public, which was huge step towards user-friendly machines.
While the Xerox Alto came 10 years earlier, but it was never sold to the public.
For this money, you got a 12-inch monochrome display, 5MHz Motorola CPU, and 1MB of RAM.
The keyboard that was attached used to fold down and out of the front casing.
A good example of generous midrange systems, the Vixen could take you back in the 1980s.
Additionally, it also had an optional 10MB external hard drive.
The Vixen was listed for $2,800, which is now around $6,200.
The Macintosh Portable was built with 1MB of RAM (expandable to 9MB) and around 16MHz Motorola CPU.
The display provided 640-by-400 resolution, monochrome and the hard drive could store up to 40MB of data.
It also came with an optional onboard modem: 9,600 baud.
The Macintosh Portable sold for $6,500 in 1989, which is around $12,500 today.
The company released its next-generation Risc PC system in 1994.
The machine had got a 17-inch monitor, a 420MB hard drive, and dual processors.
Different kinds of computing needs came with various price tags with some computers being more expensive than others.
The average retail price was about $2,300, which is about $3,400 today.
source: www.techworm.net
