Although I am quite familiar with Roanoke, VA. I didn't get that at first, thanks for pointing it out. I thought you were making some kind of redneck joke.
Incidentally it is 343 miles from Roanoke VA to Roanoke Island, NC.
I am really curious about how anyone could afford computers at these prices in the 1980s. I guess my family was really poor then. We had a C64 and later an Amiga.
Most people couldn't. And businesses which could afford them wouldn't. Which is why Lisa bombed.
But Lisa's pricing made the Mac more appealing. It wasn't exactly affordable, but you were getting maybe a third of a Lisa - including the new GUI, which was obviously the future [tm] compared to the Apple II - at less than a third of the price.
Even at the prices being charged, the Mac and PC were competitive with previous standards, and affordable enough to have a sizeable market among affluent middle class users.
They offered more than the old S-100 boxes did, for the same or less money. And they were much cheaper and more "personal" than industrial minis like the PDP-11 and the VAX.
Fun fact: Lisa sales were much better than the projections in the marketing requirements document (MRD). However, the MRD was using a much lower price ("end user price under $5000") and now the Lisa had to bring in exploding development costs. What really bombed (or flexed) was the Apple III motherboard, resulting in Apple having to reduce its line of products – and Lisa was the first to go.
Regarding the price, mind that the Lisa came with an integrated office suite (long before the success of MS Office) and was targeted at offices and professionals (think dentists). Which rendered it a somewhat curious "workstation for office work", at least from todays perspective, where eventually office machines became the epitome of cheap, bare-bones boxes.
The MRD mentions as potential users secretaries, managers, and executives (of Furtune 1500 businesses) as well as bookkeepers in general.
They didn't unless they were well off. Only 8% of houses had a computer in 1984. 15% by the end of the decade. C64 was $595 new, if you had one I doubt your family was poor.
I bought a TS1000 in 1981 or 82 for $99, and a C64 in probably spring 1983 for $299 at Circuit City. I was in 9th grade and used paper route money to get it (parents thought they were glorified Atari 2600's). Hehe, remember newspapers and paperboys?
I'm surprised only 8%. My memory of growing up in the UK in the early 80's was that ZX81'S and ZX Spectrums were super common. I bought my ZX81 in 1982 for £50 new which looks like it was maybe $80.
One of the reasons the Spectrum was so common was the low price. And of course using taps for games meant that most weren't paid for, but copied and shared around at school.
I grew up with the ZX Spectrum, like so many others, and it is what started me programming/developing/being interested in computers.
The UK actually had the highest level of computer ownership in the world at around that point.
You're probably looking at it from a biased point of view though. When I was growing up everyone had a Snes. Of course it was just all teenage boys that had one.
There seems to be a few C64's including breadbin and C64C models on eBay most days that I look. Granted some may need recapping or other work done, but there are plenty of others in working condition or only needing minimal repairs. I think you could get one for not much more than $US200 + plus shipping.
As others have noted, individuals mostly didn't own PC clones or Macs in the early 80s and they weren't even all that common in businesses.
I did buy a dual floppy PC clone in about 1983. I don't remember how much it was--wish I still had my receipts from that far back--but it was a big purchase for me at the time. [ADDED: I probably dithered over it for something like a year, during which time it became obvious that PC clones were the future rather than the S100 etc. systems running CP/M.] Based on ads from the time, it was probably about $2500 but a printer and software would have added to that.
And when I went to business school about a year later, I was one of very few people in my class who had their own computer. (There was a small computer lab in the school--that actually had a Lisa among other things as I recall. At some point when I was there they added a bigger lab with a bunch of IBM AT clones (80286s)).
My Dad bought a 386 with a whopping 40mb Hard disk in 1991 I remember him mentioning it cost a small fortune and he could have purchased a car for the same price he paid.
I remember one of my friends had a Tandy the 386 ran rings around it (it supported vga graphics for one - I can remember playing the original Civilization game and Prince of Persia on the 386).
The earliest reference for TCP/IP or Internet connectivity from that doc is in 1992. Running locally over finger before that, so I wouldn't consider that an 'internet thing' per se.
I remember using the "finger" command across the Internet back then, late 1992 - early 1993 time frame. You could use it to see if your friends were online or not, based on whether they were logged into the machine. Back then if your email was username@hostname.edu, you probably were logging in (telnetting!) into hostname.edu on a fairly regular basis!
Amazon knows. Google knows too, if your Amazon emails went to your Gmail account. Your credit card company has a good idea of who you bought from, but not what.
Is there a theory that the beginning and the ending of the universe are directly connected to each other? And that time doesn't so much start over and return to the starting point on a circle, so to speak?
I once heard of the hypothesis that once the last proton decays, the universe will once more be completely uniform in every way. With nothing to distinguish any part of the universe from any other part, space becomes meaningless and the universe has once more entered a state of nothingness much like how it was "before" the Big Bang.
So, in a sense, the heat death is not so different from the big bounce.
Unfortunately I did not bother to bookmark what I had read, and can no longer find a name or anything referring to it on the internet.
Roger Penrose believes in a model he calls Conformal Cyclic Cosmology. He doesn't believe in Cosmic Inflation, and instead proposes that the accelerating expansion of our present universe forms the inflationary period of the next universe. He gets around the second law of thermodynamics by saying that the difference between the two universes is a redefinition of entropy. The mapping between the two different definitions of entropy makes our maximal entropy state look like a minimal entropy state in the new universe.
This is very similar to my own experience. Most of my career was at small startups doing generalist things. So I could get back into that job very easily. But going to a large public company can give a 50% comp boost, but job with more restricted scope.
Incidentally it is 343 miles from Roanoke VA to Roanoke Island, NC.