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For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]

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Re: For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]

#31

Post by antihipocrat »

pryelluw wrote: post #21
usefulcat wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a great little machine. I had one and used it for many years. Played many a game on it, dabbled a bit in programming, and also used it to write pretty much every paper I wrote in high school. Back then, the alternatives were a typewriter or hand writing everything. Since I could touch type, hand writing was slower and neither alternative allowed for the kind of easy editing that is enabled by even a primitive…

I had a C64. I meant how the copy itself performed. :)

I interpreted the copy initially as justifying the product being twice the price of the competition. My eyes are used to much more concise copy nowadays though so maybe it landed properly back then?

Like: For $595 you get what nobody else can give you (and it's only) for twice the price.

Re: For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]

#32

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

My first computer was a VIC-20 (1982 or so).

3KB of RAM. So little room, I needed to write most of my apps in Machine Code. That was OK. At school, I had an STD Bus-Based 6800, with 256B.

Was a very good learning experience.

Re: For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]

#33

Post by unyttigfjelltol »

hobbitstan wrote: post #2

I pity those who missed out on those tech golden decades of the 80's and 90's. The very idea of email was revolutionary. Getting news on demand while others waited for newspaper deliveries or set time TV shows was thrilling. This is probably why Weird Science is one of my favorite films, because it captures that period where imaginations ran wild. The simple video games were fine as we used our imagination to fill in…

I still remember my first Internet search-- Phineas Gage-- and bewilderment at where this information came from. The recursive beauty is the story itself has been transformed by the Internet, and has been filled in very differently than was reported back in the mid 90s.[1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage

Re: For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]

#34

Post by fmajid »

juancn wrote: post #30
brudgers wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what "'Smart' Peripherals" are. They are computers…for example the C64’s floppy drive had its own CPU. This was also typical for printers…in fact it still is.

The disk drive uses a serial protocol and it actually has 8k of RAM and a 6502 CPU. There's no drive controller in the C64, you send serial commands to the drive and it answers. Due to a hardware bug on the CIA on the 64, the protocol is much slower than it should, which was corrected in later computers, but they messed up with the graphics and a bunch of stuff.

One of Woz's major accomplishments with the Apple II was driving a floppy drive entirely in software from the host computer's CPU, which made the floppy drive and its controller much cheaper.

Re: For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]

#35

Post by Lerc »

It's interesting to see with the benefit of hindsight, combined with the features that they chose to highlight.

The First table clearly pitches the computer as a workhorse more than a game machine. When it came down to it, the thing that really mattered for most work cases was simply how much readable text can you display at once. Colour, and sound were nice, but couldn't compete with just the ability to show information.

High end workstations of the era gave you decent resolution bitmapped displays long before they focused on colour.

I was lucky enough to grow up in a household that had at various times TRS-80, a PET, CBM8032, VIC-20 and a C64 (plus others, the Casio fx9000P, was nice but I never had the tools to go beyond BASIC) . If you wanted a computer that could do a bit of everything the C64 was a good choice, If you wanted games, it was an excellent choice, but If you wanted to work, characters on screen was what you wanted.

Re: For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]

#36

Post by cgh »

neilv wrote: post #19

I was just a little kid then, and the C64 was a neat micro, but today I can see some questionable things about their comparison matrix in the ad. Obviously, they are comparing to only the high-end competitors (e.g., Atari 800 but not the 400, and no TI 99/4A which also used their own chips like Commodore touted as a selling point, nor the TRS-80 Color Computer that was intended for home use unlike the Model III busin…

Paperclip (word processor) had an 80 column preview mode, which showed your text in hi-res 80 columns. It seemed like magic at the time and made ten year old me feel like I was performing serious business.

Re: For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]

#37

Post by Nate75Sanders »

It's a 1982 brochure, but they show Ace of Aces in the games section.

The Accolade Ace of Aces (WW2 combat flight sim) wasn't released until 1986.

It seems that this may have been a different Ace of Aces -- perhaps a version of the Nova tabletop game that never got released.

Anybody know anything about this?

Re: For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]

#39

Post by macintux »

hobbitstan wrote: post #2

I pity those who missed out on those tech golden decades of the 80's and 90's. The very idea of email was revolutionary. Getting news on demand while others waited for newspaper deliveries or set time TV shows was thrilling. This is probably why Weird Science is one of my favorite films, because it captures that period where imaginations ran wild. The simple video games were fine as we used our imagination to fill in…

I remember chatting online (MUD) with a friend in Sweden in 1990. I sent her an email, and she confirmed it arrived moments later, and my mind was blown. For some reason I felt “mail” surely couldn’t arrive that fast, even though we were chatting interactively in real time.

Re: For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]

#40

Post by echoangle »

Nate75Sanders wrote: post #37

It's a 1982 brochure, but they show Ace of Aces in the games section. The Accolade Ace of Aces (WW2 combat flight sim) wasn't released until 1986. It seems that this may have been a different Ace of Aces -- perhaps a version of the Nova tabletop game that never got released. Anybody know anything about this?

Does it say 1982 anywhere except the pricing table and the submission title here? Is it possible that the brochure is actually newer?
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