My first printer.

Post #441,716 by a6l6e6x 6/28/22 12:52:08 PM 6/28/22 12:52:08 PM Reply	My first printer. In thinning out old files of paperwork, I came across the receipt of the first printer that I bought. At that time, I would have used it with the Radio Shack TRS-80 model 1 personal computer that I had. On June 24th, 1980 I bought a Centronics 737-1 dot matrix printer and a printer cable from Radio Shack. The printer cost $850 and the printer cable $51. With $6 shipping from Cairo, Georgia to me in Charlotte, NC the total was $907. If you think about inflation of 42 years, that's quite a bit of money. Characters were of a fixed 7x7 dot matrix, 10 characters per inch (i.e. 80 characters per line). Lines were spread at 6 lines per inch. Paper had to come off a roll that was 9 inch wide with quarter inch rip off borders that had feeder holes. Ink was on a ribbon. In could print 20 full lines a minute. Another really crazy thing, nowadays, is that the receipt has my full credit card number and expiration date in addition to the transaction autherization number. Alex "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." -- Isaac Asimov
Post #441,733 by CRConrad 6/30/22 2:48:05 AM 6/30/22 2:48:05 AM Reply	How much did a new car cost then; $5,000? $10,000? So 10-20 % of the cost of a new car?
Post #441,738 by a6l6e6x 6/30/22 5:54:33 PM 6/30/22 5:54:33 PM Reply	Well, a new Chevrolet Citation was about $6K at that time. It was one of the earliest front wheel drive General Motors cars. I think current dollars are worth less than a third of 1980 dollars. Alex "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." -- Isaac Asimov
Post #441,743 by CRConrad 7/1/22 8:29:19 AM 7/1/22 8:29:19 AM Reply	Yeah, the Citation, Cimarron, and their badge-engineered brethren from Pontiac, Buick, Oldsmobile... ...and whatever brand I might be forgetting were basically the first front-wheel-drive Opel Ascona / Vauxhall Cavalier in American. (Which was, perhaps somewhat ironically, the last generation of the Ascona; the next was called Vectra. Nowadays the Cavalier is too, AFAIK.) So, ~17 percent (one sixth) of the price of a respectable-albeit-boring (lower?) middle-class car; say, a Ford Fusion[1]. What's that sell for; $25-30,000? So, uhm... ~$4,250-5,100.[2] Whew, quite the respectable chunk of cash. The fanfold paper was great, BTW: You could sketch out quite long program listings on the backside of old printouts. I kind of miss that. ___ [1]: Can't recall what GM's current equivalents of the Vectra are called, but the Fusion is the most exact correspondent from the Blue Oval, AFAICS: It's the American version of the Euro-Ford Mondeo, which is the successor to the Sierra and Taunus, which were the pretty much exact equivalents to the Vectra and Ascona. [2]: Note for Peter: Much easier to calculate as 25% and 30%, respectively, of $17,000. -- Christian R. Conrad The Man Who Apparently Still Knows Fucking Everything Mail: Same username as at the top left of this post, at iki.fi
Post #441,748 by a6l6e6x 7/1/22 5:02:52 PM 7/1/22 5:02:52 PM Reply	Agree on the fanfold paper. You don't mess up the sequence of pages! Alex "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." -- Isaac Asimov
Post #441,745 by a6l6e6x 7/1/22 2:43:05 PM 7/1/22 2:43:05 PM Reply	For me it was $7032 including taxes and maybe some optional stuff. I found the check book summary booklet. Alex "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." -- Isaac Asimov
Post #441,750 by crazy 7/1/22 9:44:36 PM 7/1/22 9:44:36 PM Reply	This is the reverse of "the computer I want syndrome" My first computer was a 486. That's the first computer I ever bought for myself. Before that moment every computer I ever worked on was provided by an employer. I went all out on that computer. I took a loan out for that computer and paid my boss back for about 6 months. That computer cost me $4,000. Every computer I've ever specked out from that moment forward for my personal use cost about $4,000. The technology got better. The monitors got better. The CPUs got faster and cheaper along with the memory. But I always wanted more more. So I would configure computers in the $4,000 range and be happy. Right now I'd be very happy with a $500 system but I just don't care anymore. Phone 99% of the time, Chromebook when I really need a screen that big but I'm not throwing my phone to the huge TV. And yes, I know I can throw the Chromebook at the screen. The phone's good enough.
Post #441,753 by a6l6e6x 7/1/22 11:35:22 PM 7/1/22 11:35:22 PM Reply	This was for hobby work at home. I had bought a Radio Shack TRS-80 16K - Level II. That's 16 KB memory! It had a Z-80 processor and a Basic language interpreter. It cost me $779, i.e. less than the printer! I modified it by adding memory and also adding a memory chip to the display circuitry so it displayed lower case letters. At that time I was working for IBM developing code for (4700) controllers that operated devices at bank branches. The controllers were connected to IBM mainframe computers at bank processing centers via modems. The banks had Apps that ran on these controllers and communicated with bank staff on various terminals, put stuff out om printers, etc. Bank transaction data would then be sent to bank's mainframes. You can look at 4700 System Overview to get a feeling of what the system was like. But the development work was on IBM mainframes on VM/370 system while using 3270 terminal. In later years when I had the IBM PC it was possible to use a modem and work from home. Alex "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." -- Isaac Asimov
Post #441,755 by Another Scott 7/2/22 12:17:32 AM 7/2/22 12:17:32 AM Reply	Lots of commonality! One of my first temp jobs after grad school was working for a small company in Dayton that sold banking software (a clone of NCR's Banker80, I think) that ran on 286s. I was hired to be a typist because I knew WordPerfect. They then wanted me to work on some new fangled thing called "hypertext" for their Help system. It was kind of a disaster because they wanted me to translate the jargon into English as well as do the data entry and link-making. It was ungodly slow on a 286 - "that's Ok, we'll just sell them faster computers!". Someone else took it over after I flailed around at it for a week or so - I don't know if they ever made anything useful with it. I bought my first computer of my very own a few years later - a Gateway 486/25 SCSI system that was $4000. And about $1000 cheaper 6 months later. :-/ Put a 486/66 in it a year or two later. My dad got me a Sinclair ZX something or other when I was a kid, but I never could see the point of it. I mean it was amazing for $99 or whatever it was, but what could it do that was actually interesting? Ooh! I can calculate pi!! WooHoo!! :-/ :-) Cheers, Scott.
Post #441,762 by scoenye 7/4/22 9:26:02 PM 7/4/22 9:26:02 PM Reply	ZX-80? That one was pretty rudimentary. My first machine was a ZX-81 (nominally 1Kb RAM, but I splurged and got the 16Kb pack.) It was good enough to send me down this career path.

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