Computer for sale - $5,995

$5,995, in about 1980, or something? Is that a genuine advertisement, or an April 1st one?!

WOW! I NEVER heard of it! BTW the look of the gadgets you showed, is how MANY modems used to look. The phone company, in the US at least, USED to insist you register things, although people rarely did. Before THAT, they actually insisted you use leased equipment. To get past that, and make modems simpler, they had these devices where you dialed up the computer and put the handset on the couplers. The phone company couldn't complain, because the equipment on their side was all compliant. For a while, all the handsets were fashioned the same way. Later DC HAYES came up with a method almost everyone copied, and it was fully direct connect.

WOW! I just checked to see what ever happened to hayes. They bet the WHOLE company on ISDN! ***I***could have told them it was a bad move. Anyway, it was a LOUSY standard! The ONLY reason it had to exist is that it could combine two lines, as most homes had at least 2 lines coming into the home, and run them at the highest compatible speed possible. It was STILL less than 1/10th the speed of a T1, and people kept using more and more bandwidth. They started leasing T1s, but they were expensive.

They said ISDN DID catch on in Europe and Japan, but maybe the things were different. Maybe the lines were better, and it was faster. Maybe the cost of the line was lower. Maybe they adopted earlier, or things didn't change as fast. But in the US? Well, I started a job with a company that was to sell it and they gave me a book on it. I don't recall them EVER selling an ISDN line! They had NO ISDN modems. I don't remember seeing them in stores. I never got to use what I learned!

Hayes didn't see the writing on the wall, and died a slow death.

Steve

That tandy looks like one of the better ones. Most were either behemoths, or ones designed so poorly they practically fall apart.

I think nearly all feel that 3.1, 95,98, 2000, XP, and 7 got progressively better. VISTA was a joke. I started with 3.0 and had some nice things, but it was like a DOG. The upgrade to 3.1 was a great improvement. And windows 3.0 was apparently when things started to take off. Look at us! ALL THESE years, and we STILL talk about 3.1, yet it seems that even 2 DECADES ago nobody spoke of earlier versions.

That said, windows still has some BIG problems. I HOPE the next version addresses them. They COULD, for example, dedicate a core, on a multicore system to the O/S. You could have it to where windows nearly NEVER hangs, so you can deal with the problem processes in a timely fashion. Maybe they could have a settable idle to move old tasks into swap, so the tasks you need to run are in memory.
They could have a media sanity switch that disables all audio graphic processes that aren't in focus.

Steve

He, he, yep this was what l played around with in High School, or college for US, members.



I pretty much lived in the computer room, full of these clunky things, (to scared to mingle outside and potentially get bashed).

As a small group of others did, b/w screen, pixels you could see from a few metres away, and some cool games.

Well, ping, snake, and some seriously crappy version of Doom, with 3D rooms, if you can call a few lines rooms?

Atari 2600, was a step up from these, but not much of a step!

Shane