Re: World-wide 8-bit computer sales (all-time)?

[vairxpert@hotmail.com (vairxpert)]

On Wed, 02 Jul 2003 01:25:30 GMT, "Sam Gillett" <samgillett@msn.com>
wrote:

>
>Paul Schlyter wrote ...
>
>>BTW the XT had a hard disk (10 MBytes -- tiny by today's standards but
>>enormous back then), which probably partly explains why the XT was so
>>expensive (the other reason it was so expensive was of course the
>>brand name "IBM".  Otoh, when Apple released the Lisa, and later the
>>first Macs, they did the same thing: these were _not_ cheap machines!).
>
>The hard drive was an option on most of the XT clones.  Not sure if the IBM
>was available without it or not.  Back in the mid 1980's a lot of home users
>bought a bare bones machine and added a hard drive later.  By buying an RLL
>drive controller card instead of an MFM card, you could end up with 35
>megabytes of drive space for the price of a 20 megabyte drive.    :-)

The HD was an option on the original IBM PC.  10 meg was standard on
the XT and I think 20 was an option.

I did the RLL thing...it worked great with certain drives.  I was able
to squeeze 32 megs out of an MFM drive that way.  Sleazgates just
wouldn't fly with that trick though.

I loved the BBS's back then and how each would brag in the opening
screen about the amount of online space they had.  I remember being
blown away when "Last Chance" upped his to 85 megs!

Then around '87 a crazy guy that owned a local Shakey's Pizza ran a
BBS out of that restaurant.  I ended up getting a summer time job
there.  I think he lost his business due to the amount of money he
invested in that Tandy.  Back then with the optical worm drives his
bragging rights were around 12 gigs.  Every night he called around the
country downloading new programs off of other top notch subcription
BBS's (I think he had a script that automatically downloaded all new
files).  One happened to be Rusty and Eddies.  Every night was like
Christmas for me...I was getting every current release game, some
before they even made it to the store shelves and business software
that I had no need for but still downloaded it anyways.  All a local
phone call away.  He didn't even realize what he was doing and this
went on for over a year until some jackass tipped him off.

I got to find out what happend to that guy.  Eventually the business
failed and the BBS went along with it.

George