7 replies to this topic

[Rob]

Doing some cleaning of the office space and came across an old invoice for a workstation. The scan isn't the best (b/c the orginal is a faded ditto machine copy...) but figured some around here would get a kick out of this; See attached pic.

Compaq Deskpro 386/20 Model 130 with:
-20 MHz 80386 Processor
-2MB Memory
-130MB Hard Disk (Internal)
-Floppy Diskette Drives - 1.2MB and 360KB
-Keyboard
-Communication Ports - (2) Serial, (2) Parellel

15" Graphics Display Subsystem
-Resolution 640 x 480, 256 Colors

Merry Christmas Cartotalkers!!! And Derek, sorry my file is so large...

 old_comp_invoice.jpg   1.3MB   191 downloads

[Derek Tonn]

You know I love a good challenge, Rob... Happy Holidays!

Attached Files

•  old_comp_invoice.png   164.04K   77 downloads

[MapMedia]

And the time I paid $1200 for a PC XT at a computer fair. lol
Then the time in high school when my friend's father, who was a VP for Conrail, invited us to the office building in downtown Philadelphia for an open-house.
The occasion? Every office sported a new Apple 2e or 2c. We had the place to ourselves! Don't think I would want to see a scanned copy of that invoice anytime soon.

Back to the CAD invoice. If you consider Arcmap license, Adobe products, input devices, hardware, monitor, printer/plotter, etc., the $14k is kinda holding steady today in terms of what it costs to fully set-up a carto/gis office, sans marketing and operational budgets.

[Hans van der Maarel]

Ah, the good old days...

I was actually fairly late on the computer bandwagon. It was not until I was 17 that I first owned one (1994, an old hdd-less XT, 2 360k floppy drives, Hercules b/w monitor), even though I first used one when I was about 7 or 8 (my 2nd grade highschool teacher had a C64 in class, with the coolest map game on it: you had to fly a helicopter over a map and visit all these cities).

Mind you, for its time Rob's 386 was probabely a *monster*. And today, you could still spend $14k on a computer. Of course it'd be a gazillion times faster...

*nostalgia sets in*

[rudy]

Since we're on the nostalgia trip . . . when I was in my 3rd or 4th year of university I got my student loan a little late in the year so I had made other financial arrangements. When the loan came in, I had "extra" money so I went out and spent $2000 on buying my first (and only) Apple - an Apple IIc. Used it for word processing and, of course, games. I had it for about 7 years then it disappeared around the time I got married. Hmmmmm . . . . . Looking at some of the prices, $2000 wasn't actually too bad. mind you, it had no hard drive and everything ran off floppies. A nice little computer, though.

My last year in high school was the first year our school had computers and computer science. We used TRS-80s that came all in one piece and had to solve physics problems with them.
 appleiic.JPG   28.21K   133 downloads

[mike]

Great scan! Computers have gone a long way, haven't they?

I got my first computer in 1993.... 486 DX2 66mhz with 4mb ram, 1mb video card, and I think 100mb hdd. I think it was close to $5000. i think my family paid way too much for it. but it was the early 90s.... i even got a 28.8k modem and got online for the very first time in 94/95 using AOL. haha i remember learning about IRQ conflicts (way before they were automated) and wondered why my modem only worked when my mouse moved. LOL .... eventually I figured it out and switched the IRQ (by hand, using jumpers on the modem).

[Polaris]

I'll share too...

I bought a similar Compaq 386/20 around the same time for the company I was working for. We used it to run atmospheric dispersion models for air pollution research and regulatory support. The 386/20 would do a typical model run in a day and half or so. Prior to that, we had been running the models on an IBM mainframe - which took about 30 minutes of CPU time - at a cost (I believe) of around $100 per minute! - you'd better have your 'JCL' (job control language) just right or the thing could crash halfway through and you had to pay for the time anyway. What a bargain the 386/20 was - and what a beast we thought it was at the time.

A year or two later, I bought a 486/33 for personal use and it could run the model in around 6 hours.

The last time I messed with those models (ca. 1996?), it was on a Pentium 200 and they ran in a matter of minutes.

Nowadays, I suppose I could do the model runs, render the results in 3D, and make a 30 fps animation of the pollution cloud spreading over the terrain in near real time.

Eric

[Hans van der Maarel]

haha i remember learning about IRQ conflicts (way before they were automated) and wondered why my modem only worked when my mouse moved. LOL .... eventually I figured it out and switched the IRQ (by hand, using jumpers on the modem).

Oh, don't get me started on that IRQ's, jumpers, MS-DOS memory management ("640k ought to be enough for everybody").

And now... it just works... well... that is to say...