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Strategies & Market Trends : The Art of Investing
PICK 45.22-0.6%Nov 18 4:00 PM EST
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To: Sun Tzu who wrote (3120)1/2/2022 12:28:59 AM
From: Kirk ©  Read Replies (2) of 10601
 
Almost every technical innovation starts out very expensive and then comes down in price. Even Tesla's first EV was over $100K for an impractical 2-seater sports car with a body style that was a knockoff of a roadster with an ICE.

I think HP isn't on "that list" because its portable computers were sold more as "calculators." The one I used had memory on a cassette tape, a display using LEDs invented by some I ended up working with for a single line display and you could get a thermal printer to make copies of your programs. If you were rich, you could pay $5K for a very good portable computer. I believe my HS math advisor (and department chair) took ours home over the Christmas break so he could use it on his own time... maybe some guise that it was expensive and could be stolen....

I think the computer club "personal computers" were far cheaper and did much less as you'd expect. Look at what they say for the 1975: Altair 8800
The Altair 8800 is a microcomputer designed in 1974 by MITS and based on the Intel 8080 CPU.[2] Interest grew quickly after it was featured on the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics[3] and was sold by mail order through advertisements there, in Radio-Electronics, and in other hobbyist magazines. [4][5] The Altair is widely recognized as the spark that ignited the microcomputer revolution[6] as the first commercially successful personal computer.[7] The computer bus designed for the Altair was to become a de facto standard in the form of the S-100 bus, and the first programming language for the machine was Microsoft's founding product, Altair BASIC.[8][9]
The HP computers/calculators were real computing machines. I wrote programs on the one I used in Basic programming language. That was fairly sophisticated at the time when most of the "toys" were programed in much more difficult machine language.

Look at this one from 1974... it was EXPENSIVE but it was portable and far more powerful than the cheap PCs that came along later at a much lower price.

This was a big investment for our high school where cutting became a huge problem that was costing the school a fortune as the State pays per student in class... $5K in 1973 would probably buy two cars!

hpmuseum.net


9821A		Early Calc and Computers Selection:
Name: 9821A
Product Number: 9821A
Introduced: 1973
Division: Calculator Products
Original Price: $4975
Catalog Reference: 1975, page 534


Description:

The 9821A was identical to the 9820A except it had a cassette tape mechanism for mass storage instead of a magnetic card reader
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