"Mark Metzler wrote:
I was in WalMart last night, and I swung by the Electronics area. I was curious as to how much a replacement drive would cost me for my PC at home, which has a 17gb drive in it. They had a 80gig drive sitting on the shelf next to the surge suppressors for $70. Never mind that it comes with the software to copy everything to the new drive. So I stood there trying to do the math on what it would cost to equate that volume of storage with ST506 drives at $1995.00 a pop. My head started hurting, so I rounded the ST506 to $2000.
It would take 16,000 ST506’s to reach the memory of the drive in WalMart (again sitting on the shelf, not behind a locked cabinet).
At $2000.00 a pop, it would cost me $32,000,000.00.
Now that would have been a nice sale, but would have been stolen by Jim Scharffe or Mike Daniel.
Here is another perspective. If stacked on top of one another, they would be as tall as a 667 story building.
If from sea level, they would stack high enough to top the tallest building in Downtown Denver.
If sold with a cabinet and power supply, Josef Rabinowitz would be retired. "
"Ohmigod! I'm reminded of when I worked for Heath Kline at Priority One Electronics in Chatsworth...and before that for Galaxy Computers in Woodland Hills when the Commodore 64 was introduced! We thought it huge compared to the Timex Sinclair...."
"We both have been into computers since 1970's & currently own 6 OSBORNE's in working condition. Although we use DOS now, we miss cpm & how actually FAST it was compared to Windows. We miss dBase. Append as well instead of Access now. We still have data on 5 1/4" discs we need to put into the dos machines we use now.
Sorry to hear you are leaving the business - we certainly hope you find a buyer who will keep the collection intact!
Best to you & your wonderful efforts!"
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Heathkit Heathkit H9 Video Terminal (sys 2)
The H9 is an alphanumeric video terminal announced in 1989 to work with any digital computer, but built for the Heathkit H8. The H9 terminal consists of a 12” CRT display and uses a 67 key ASCII upper case keyboard with 80 characters displayed. Baud rate is selectable from 110-9600. Standard serial Interfaces include EIA standard serial, 20mA loop, and TTL input/output. The H8 was the first 8080 computer made by Heath. It had a sloping front panel mounting a 9-digit keypad which could be used to program it in machine language. However, it used octal notation rather than the Hex notation which was used on the S-100 machines. It was a bus machine with a unique 50-pin bus. Expansion cards and peripherals were available for the machine, including the memory and speech cards, the H7 floppy disk assembly, and the H10 paper tape reader/punch. The H8 needed at least 16K of memory for nominal operation and 48K if a floppy disk was to be used. The maximum memory capacity was 64K. The H8 had no internal video but was designed to be used with a terminal such as the H9 Video Terminal which had a 12" CRT. (part of above courtesy of www.pc-history.org)
