Back in 1983 in Compute magazine, my friend Kathy Yakal wrote, that 1983 “might be the Christmas of the computer.” It would be the first holiday season when “the home computer [was] well withing the budgets of many American consumers.” So, what computing toys did you have to choose from in 1983? Brace yourself, there won’t be a smartphone or tablet to be seen.
You may be too young for this, but one of IBM’s best ad campaigns ever featured Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp. And, he was touting IBM’s newest PC stars: the IBM PC and the IBM PC XT. The XT came with 4.77MHz 8088 processor, a 10 MB hard drive, 128KB RAM and a 360KB floppy drive. For this top of the line business machine, you only had to pay $5,000.