PEARSON@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA (11/22/83)
From: William Pearson <PEARSON@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA> There seems to be a pretty general impression out there that although the IBM-PC is good machine, it is overpriced. If you are willing to treat the PC as a kit, prices are quite competitive. To buy a cheap PC do the following: Buy an IBM-PC with floppy disk controller but no drives. List: $1575 (many stores will sell this because IBM drives have been in short supply and they can sell the drive) Get the color graphics adapter : $244. Buy two Tandon TM100-2 drives from a mail order house. Prices range from $240 - $260. A small mail order place that doesn't take out full page ads in Byte may be a little cheaper. Buy 2 - 3 sets of 9 4164 64K RAM chips ($55 from PC mail order houses, sometimes less from chip mail order houses). Buy a B/W monitor $130-150. You now have a 192K, 2 - 320K floppy system for: $2569. Add $135 for serial port and clock/calendar (AST I/O Plus). Add DOS for $40. There is no cheaper machine with similar capabilities (memory, graphics, communications, software support). In addition, some store will discount the IBM prices, especially if you work for a company or school that is getting an IBM discount (which range past 25%, but discount the list price of disk drives.) If you wand a cheaper machine, try the Heath Z-100 kit, (All in one) for $2000 + $250 for the second drive, or $1900 + $250 +$150 for the low profile (requires the $150 monitor). The graphics on the Z-100 are better, (higher resolution, no flashing), but not IBM compatible when I last looked. Z-100's wired are selling for around $2500 at discount, which includes CPM85 (standard 8 bit CP/M), MS-DOS, some BASICs, and for a short time Lotus 1-2-3. The Z-100 also inclues a parallel and two serial ports. The only problem with it is its not an IBM-PC, and Heath/Zenith are very slow releasing software. It has 192K max on the board, additional 256K for $600. (You can get 512K for an IBM at that price). One last comment - putting an IBM-PC together yourself is very easy. I have told several non-computer/hacker/EE types to try it, and they have had no trouble. The PC comes with a diagnostics disk, which you can run for several hours to test the disk drives, the only thing that might be flakey. I have been very surprised that the IBM-PC is both an IBM product, the most popular computer on the market, and very price competitive. Why buy and Eagle or Corona or Columbia when you can build an IBM for the same price. Bill Pearson
BRACKENRIDGE%USC-ISIB@sri-unix.UUCP (11/23/83)
From: Billy <BRACKENRIDGE@USC-ISIB> I'd like to add to your message that USC/ISI has been doing exactly as you have suggested on an institutional scale. The key to this is to get IBM or your friendly Computerland to ship an unassembled untested system. In order to do this legally someone on site must have taken the IBM service course. I have never met the man, but there is rumored to be such a graduate somewhere on campus so we qualify. We have found a 10% mortality rate on these untested systems. This is no problem as the systems are on warentee and we just pile all the bad components in one system and ship it back to IBM. This allows a slight discount on top of the standard educational discount. We then buy disk drives 50 at a time and can beat the discount houses here. The one thing we can't seem to beat is AST I/O+ cards. Buying them 15-25 at a time direct from AST still can't match the singles prices from the discount suppliers. Direct sales from IBM just haven't been worth the effort for orders less than 50 machines. After we have cleared the majority of the campus paperwork we call up a list of retailers and ask them to bid delivery time and price. We can usually get same week delivery and greater than 20% discount for up to 15 systems this way. We have never been able to get a system with no disk drives.