How much would you pay for a PC with 128KB RAM, and no hard disk?

In today’s money (inflation adjusted)

This an ad from Personal Computer World (UK) from 1985

  • zerbey@lemmy.worldEnglish
    27·
    1 year ago

    This is why the ZX Spectrum was so important, in 1982 it cost £125 for the 16K model (£469 or so now). That’s within the reach of many consumers. Sure, it was laughably simplistic even at launch, but if it wasn’t for the Speccy I wouldn’t be an IT professional today.

    • Oneobi@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      1 year ago

      My Dragon 32 or 64 (can’t remember which it was) has a lot to answer for too!

      • zerbey@lemmy.worldEnglish
        10·
        1 year ago

        Whole bunch of low cost 8-bit machines in that era, the Dragon 32, Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC ranges to name but a few. Of course we must also mention the BBC Micro, was not low cost but every school had one if you grew up in the UK.

        • khannie@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          We had one in my school in Ireland too (and I think they were common in schools here) but tbh none of the teachers knew how to use it and so we got very little time on it in school.

    • Loulou@lemmy.mindoki.comEnglish
      5·
      1 year ago

      Hey ZX-81 gang here!

      999SKR (Swedish crowns) guess it was like 100$ and it gave you a 1KB 1Mhz computer :-) around 400SKR more for an expansion card with a whopping 16KB…

      Went the C64 way but damn that Spectrum was sexy back in the day.

    • TrivialBetaState@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      So true! My parents got me the C64 when I had no idea about computers. I loved the Spectrum+ my buddy had at the time but always wanted the C128 another friend of mine got. My parents eventually upgraded my computer to an Amstrad CPC6128 when they saw that I was actually programming in BASIC. I learned a lot from that computer too, e.g. Fortran, Pascal, a bit of Z80 assemly (the last one was horrible!)