by Ron Enderland

I fondly remember the first time that I fell in love. We met in the showroom of Cordes-Brown Toyota in Fayetteville, Arkansas in 1977. She was a beauty, a dark green Celica Liftback.

I remember looking at the sticker price and sighing deeply. How on earth could I ever hope to afford a car that costs 5000 bucks?

What can you get for five grand in a car dealership today? Maybe keyless entry on an Infiniti.

Yes, automobile prices have skyrocketed. My first house cost about what a reasonably loaded family sedan brings today. Ahh, how we long for the good old days . . .

While digging through my junk the other day, I made an interesting discovery. It was a February 1988 Global Computer Supply catalog.

Global is a respected outfit, still in business, and still doing very well. Their prices are quite competitive with anyone. This was also the case in 1988, the Jurassic Period of computing. The Good Old days.

Windows were glass structures on your house. Microsoft was the outfit that made MS-DOS and a handful of so-so apps. Lotus ruled the spreadsheets, Borland made the only serious word processor. Let's take a trip down Memory Lane and look at some common system components and their prices . . .

Page nine has a Parrot Pocket-Size modem. It came with Pro Comm software on a 5 +" disk, internal speaker, status lights, and self-adhesive Velcro to attach to the side of your PC. It cost $135.00. Oh, yes, the speed was a blazing 1200 baud. Remember, back then, the internet was a text-only protocol that colleges and the US government had going.

On page sixteen, you could find a RAMQUEST 50/60 Add-On Board. This incredible device would actually add two megabytes of memory to your PS/2 Model 50 or 60. The price was a paltry $850.00.

On this same page, you could also find the top-of-the-line video card: The Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA) with 256K video RAM. This beauty would actually produce "dazzling 640X350 color graphics." The price? Only $195.00.

On the next page, your mouth watered as you eyeballed a Hewlett-Packard LaserJet Series II printer. This baby produced 300 DPI resolution and came with 512K standard memory. It was a cool $2195.00.

The piece de resistance was found on this same page. It was a Global PC/AT 286 computer that came with one MB of 80ns RAM. It included two serial ports, two parallel ports, a 1.2 MB DS/HD floppy disk drive, a hard disk controller card, a display adapter supporting 640X400 CGA/MDA color graphics, and a mouse/light pen interface. The price was $1695.00.

"Hey, that's not bad!" you might say. Well, read between the lines.

You get a hard drive controller, not a hard drive. A Seagate 40 MB Half-Height hard disk ran you $635.00. You also needed a monitor. The computer ad folks today like to picture a full system and add the little note "monitor not included" somewhere off to the side. In 1988, the full system was pictured, but the note was nowhere to be found. The list of prices revealed that a 14" color monitor (not EGA) added $295.00 to the cost.

Okay, we're ready to run now, right? Let's turn it on. Hey! It says "Insert system disk!" I guess that we forgot to order MS-DOS 3.2 for 90 bucks.

All right, we finally have a state-of-the-art system. The price? Well, I guess it "grew" to $2715.00.

Yep, I still think about that beautiful green Liftback that crossed my path in 1977. Five grand seems like a tiny amount compared to what cars cost today.

I guess that I'll just fire up the old Pentium 90 with 20 MB of RAM and a 33.6 modem (I got it for 500 bucks plus my old 486 SLC), hit the Toyota home page, and tearfully recall how much better things used to be . . .