by , 9:00 AM EST, January 30th, 2001
We see it all around us, but sometimes it takes a focal point to remind us how much computers have changed in, say, the last 12 years. We received this scanned image of a newspaper ad the IT guys at La Presse who apparently have a good sense of humor.
Say, what was a computer like in 1989? Just how much did a top of the line PC go for back then? This baby was produced by Tandy Corporation, the owner of Radio Shack. During the late 80's and early 90's, Tandy was actually a big player in the PC market. They say Macs were too expensive, but how does CN$8499 grab you for a 386?
A lightning-fast (!) 20 MHz processor, MS-DOS, VGA graphics, 2 MB RAM with a maximum of 16 MB, no mouse or monitor, all that for CN$8499. We did the math, and found out that one could pay this in 170 easy payments of $49.95! That doesn't count interest, of course...
At the same time, Apple introduced the Macintosh IIci in September of 1989. That beast raced along at 25 MHz (32 bit processing), came with 1 MB of RAM but maxed out at 128 MB (with 8 SIMM slots), had a 40 MB internal hard drive, and supported operating systems through OS 7.6.1 which was released some 9 years later. Not too shabby. We don't have Canadian pricing for the IIci in 1989, so if you do, please let us know or post your comments below.
Note that PageMaker is running on the machine, the same program that brought desktop publishing to the Mac. This would have been on of the first PC ports of PageMaker, but our guess is that PageMaker was not used to actually lay this particular ad out (we could be wrong, but it's not a very good looking ad). Also note that among the supported operating systems, there is nary a mention of Windows. That may be a bigger sign of how much things have changed than the price!