RE: [cobalt-users] (OT) Posting to the list In General

["Cavan Kelly" <cavan@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm really late to the nostalgia party, but in answer to "how much"...

Back in the late '76 - early '77, before the Canadian $ became the
"northern-peso" and was worth about $1.05US, my SOL-20 kit cost me about
$3,000 landed in Toronto.  8K memory boards were $125.  A little after that
Micropolis introduced their dual 360K floppy disk system for the S-100 bus
and it cost me $2,100.  Before that it was cassette based stuff (CUTS or
Kansas City format).  I had a TRS-80 on order but they kept burning up
during CSA (Canadian Standards Association) testing and weren't allowed into
the country until many months after they were available in the US so I
cancelled it.  I got lucky on that one :)

To put those numbers in perspective, I was just starting out as a estimating
trainee for a company that manufactured point of sale ad material.  I made
$130/week.

Remember how we used to get sound?  We placed a transistor radio next to the
unit and generated it with RF interference.  Yes, those were the days <vbg>

Some of the other machines that passed through here were an Exidy Sourcerer,
a Kaypro, an Osborne (these two were portables - well, they folded up and
had handles but weighed about 40 lbs).  My first MS-DOS based system was a
Sanyo 550. Far ahead of it's time with all points addressable color graphics
but doomed to failure because it was not IBM hardware compatible.  I founded
perhaps the first Sanyo users group along with Indra Laksono (who modified
the Sanyo OS to run GEM and later became lead developer at ATI Technologies)
and Norm Wacholz who designed a combination IBM compatible serial port and
memory expansion card for the 550 series which allowed us to run popular
software such as minitel.

To whomever started this thread, thanks for giving us "old guys" a chance to
stroll down memory lane.