Old... okay. I still have my first compubox, an H-8. This predated Apple, Commodore, IBM, Radio Shack, etc. Over 20 years ago I paid $100 for each one of 16k ram (yes, k!). It used an character terminal that could actually do graphics... as long as the graphics consisted of alphanumeric characters. It came with, for the times, really really fast cassette tape drive data storage- floppy disk drives were not yet economically feasible for hobbyists. Eventually I did get a hard disk for it. It was the size of very big microwave oven. This was reasonable considering that it was a humongous 5 megs of storage. Pretty cheap too- about $9,000 in those days. Oh yes- I had to put it together myself. And I don't mean some wimpy job like today, where you plug boards in a box. I mean I had to solder every single resistor, capacitor, chip etc to the boards, including chip sockets. Even the case was in pieces. Without the hard disk I think I spent about $8 or $9,000 on this thing. No graphics, no disk drives, no colour, no sound except for a beep, 16k ram and most stuff had to be programmed in machine language because there wasn't a decent BASIC available for it. So when people complain about the price of today's computers I have to chuckle to myself. Primitive as this box was, it was still good enough to be used by NASA and ran rings around the minicomputers of the day. Today I use an IBM notebook I can tuck under my arm with hires colour, DVD, 20 gigs hard, 192 megs ram and stereo. Added are cd burner, graphic tablet, digital camera, networking, asdl, scanner, printer, etc. Without software I doubt this all cost more than $6,000- equivalent to maybe $2,000 20 years ago. For some things the good old days just weren't that good...