OT: Apple at 30 - My Piece of the Big Fruit

[jeffrey reynolds]

I remember getting my 2mb upgrade for my SE to go to 2.5mb in 1988.  
it cost $350 through the berkeley education program (i was a grad  
student then). it was right when there was that short, but big,  
memory price spike (i think it was a fake shortage thing by some  
overseas suppliers) and when the chips were delivered the street  
price on them was up over $1000. as i walked out of the campus office  
where i picked up the little package with the simms, there were  
literally about a dozen professors in the hall outside trying to buy  
simms off folks since they were very hard to get. I could have made a  
fast $500-600 profit if i had been willing to part with them then  
bought them a couple of months later for like $250. being the  
lifetime propeller head i am i resisted. that was a month of grad  
student pay!

my first mac IIfx with 13" color monitor came in at $7k on the Apple  
developer program which at that time was close to half retail. it  
sooo fast at the time! it survived a half cup of coffee getting  
sucked up into it (coffee under those machines would get sucked up by  
convection through some small slots and then short the mother board)  
and lived on for years with an 040 accelerator card.

fond memories... Basis108, Mac Plus, Mac SE, Mac IIfx, Powerbook 100,  
Powermac 8200, Powerbook duo 230, Powerbook 5300cs, PowerComputing  
120, Powermac G4 dual 450, powerbook Ti, G5 dual 2ghz, 17" powerbook  
G4...

makes my head hurt to total the money spent on these, but its earned  
me a living all the time and been enjoyable!

cheers,

jeff reynolds

On Mar 30, 2006, at 1:00 PM, use-revolution-request at lists.runrev.com  
wrote:

>> What a fun 'blast from the past'!
>>
>> I was about to choke on your description of the $10k IIci but
>> then remembered that our own first Mac -- a II plain and tall
>> -- was a good $3k on an edu discount ca 1989, and that a 
>> color monitor would have run us an extra $600 US.  And that
>> the 'upgrade' from 1 MB -> 2 MB RAM was more than $100 US
>> several years later (for the kiddies, that's more than the
>> pizza or two that $100 would buy today).