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Original prices on Vintage gear

JT64

Experienced Member
Joined
Oct 21, 2008
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402
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Sweden
I read a budget 8088 did cost 1600 dollar, was that with our without monochrome monitor?
I also read that a ITT PC XTRA with MCGA did cost 4365 dollar why was it so expensive was it the 10 Mhz 8088 that set the price or something else about it?

Can anyone estimate a price for a PC ´XTRA with a Victor GM-1288, MCGA today. The original HDD is since long gone, i am not about to sell it but i just want to know the pricerange. Is it 50 dollar 100 or even 500?

Do anyone know how big series these were made, i do not see many of them on net?
 
The original IBM PC with monitor and printer cost $4500.00. My best buddy bought one, I think it was 1983 or so and he showed me the receipt.
 
I read a budget 8088 did cost 1600 dollar, was that with our without monochrome monitor?

if you're referring to introductory IBM PC pricing, the $1600 configuration had no monitor at all... or drives for that matter. AFAIK it had a CGA card and you were expected to hook it up to your TV set (the 5153 CGA monitor wasn't even available yet).
 
It depended on the timeframe. When Leading Edge released the Model D in 1985, it was just a basic 8088 clone with a couple of floppy drives and a mono monitor priced at $1500. At that price they couldn't keep the machine in stock. It started a price war and prices came down pretty rapidly from there, but not as quickly as prices fall today.

In 1989-1990 or so, it was pretty easy to track down an 8088-based machine for a few hundred dollars.
 
I believe by 'budget 8088' he was referring to a clone, not an IBM.

ah, then that would depend on when it was sold - 8088-based clones were in the running for almost a decade.

Eric posted the invoice from when his Dad purchased an early IBM 5150. Itemizied several of the items. Here is the link http://www.vintage-computer.com/ibm_pc.shtml.

After reading the caption, I stand corrected - the $1600 base price didn't include the CGA, either.

What's kinda amusing is the Date Of Sale on that receipt... 1/2/81 was well before the 5150's annoucement. Guess it was two days into 1982, and the salesman was a bit slow in figuring out that we're not in '81 anymore :)
 
A good place to look at the prices on stuff as it originally was in the 80's is to get on Google Books and look up PC Mag, Infoworld, and various other computing magazines of the era. I've been on a kick of that myself recently trying to see who was using what hardware. The main one I look through is PC Magazine circa 1984-1993, and it's amazing what some stuff cost back then - a Compaq 486 DX server in 1989 with 3 processors was as much as a Ford Ranger pickup truck from the same era for example.

Prices seemed to vary wildy from brand to brand over those years too, you had some like Compaq, IBM, and TI who were reaching the $5-6,000 area for something with color graphics and 10MB of space to store your otherwise floppied data to. Then you had little local brands (GEM, Cactus, CAT, etc...) who seemed to be under-cutting their mainstream competitiors with similar machines for less using Dalco catalog level parts. Seems $1500-1600 for an 8088 in the mid 1980's without a monitor but with CGA or Monochrome video card0 was the standard.
 
The comparison came from a Tandy in-store flyer for the Model 2000, but according to it the following IBM PC-XT setup cost $3658.00 as of 9/1/83:

128k RAM, 8088 at 4.77mhz, dual 320k floppy drives, mono display (text only), RS-232 and parallel printer ports, MS-DOS 2.0

This came from my FAQ for the Model 2000. The early AT's were nearly $7000 once you added a 20MB hard disk and color graphics to it. In these days of such cheap commodity computers, it's hard for people to imagine them being so expensive. I know in 1987 I bought a Tandy 1000HX brand new, with a CM-11 monitor, PLUS modem, PLUS Memory expansion, and external 5-1/4" disk drivek and it cost me roughly $1400. I have a Model 2000 price schedule dated November 30, 1983 that was sent out to Washington D.C. area stores, and then the origianl sales receipt for one bought by Misosys on December 29, 1983.

Jeff
 
After reading the caption, I stand corrected - the $1600 base price didn't include the CGA, either.

IBM's corporate web pages (and most other references) state that the lowest "bundled" configuration consisting of a 16K 5150 and a CGA card for TV hookup was $1,595. That of course had no disk drives. In addition to that $1595 price there are a lot of references to a configuration that was $3,005 for "64k, a single floppy drive, and a monitor". I have to assume that the monitor in that case was the 5151 Mono and the bundled video adapter MDA, but... I'm sure *someone* around here must have a copy of the original IBM suggested retail price lists.

Assuming that $1,595 starting bundle *did* include the CGA card, which was otherwise sold for $300 separately, I suppose you could argue that a 5150 *alone* would have cost $1295 "unbundled" at intro. Said configuration would have been useless obviously, which raises the question whether IBM would actually have a SKU for that; they may not have allowed starting with anything less than either the $1595 "TV Bundle" or a slightly more expensive bundle including the MDA card, which retailed for what, $385 instead of $300? And... perhaps starting bundles with disk drives were priced differently than cassette-only versions, IE, the starting point was "PC, drive, disk controller, and minimum RAM to run DOS (which might have been 48k?) to which was tacked the mandatory purchase of a video adapter?

But, yeah, if you're talking about clones how much one cost totally depends on what year you're discussing.
 
Hi
As I recall, the Nicolet 1080 was someplace between $10KUSD and $20KUSD.
I recall the MDS computers from Intel were around $6KUSD for a stripped down one
and about $15KUSD for one that you could actually do work with. These were
both around 1970-1980 sometime. The Nicolet is the older.
Dwight
 
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