I remember having most of this stuff…minus the modem and printers. I learned how to program in BASIC on the ATARI 2600 with a tape drive to store all the data. Those were the days, 6 pages of code to make some stupid looking pixel gorilla walk across the screen. I built my first computer out of an 8086 with a 2400 baud modem. BBS all the way!!!! Here is the caption with this picture.
Home computer
(Tribune archive photo)
The cost of setting up a home computer in 1983 was, from left: printer $499, cassette recorder $59, central processing unit $1,000, modem $149 and graphics printer $995.
So the grand total for all of those parts is…$2,702. Mind you this is for a system where you manually had to boot the damn thing…lol. There was no BIOS chips back then with memory on them. Fun stuff. Check out the jump to see a bunch of other old systems and technology from the hay-day of computers.
Source: The Chicago Tribune
