Having always been a technology fan, especially into computers, you learn something early on. The Early Adopter Tax. If it’s new, hot, and you want it now, you will pay double for it compared to the price that it will surely sink to within six months. It’s always fun (and somewhat painful) to go back and see what you paid for early gadgets. I have blogged about this before, having obtained my first computer from my dad who “traded” a complete central air and heat system for our Atari Setup. At the time, we came out REAL good on that deal. The early Atari’s were EXPENSIVE. Looking back, it was insane.
In the late 80’s early 90’s, before the proliferation of Teh Interwebs, BBS’ were all the rage. I ran a fairly successful single line BBS called Castle Rock for almost 3 years. The early days of online computing, speeds were not gauged on your CPU , but your modem was the bottle neck. For a long time, we were stuck at 300 baud, which was insanely slow. Then the jump to 1200 baud. After that there was a lull, but rumors were rampant about the next new thing in technology. The 9600 baud modem. 9600 Baud. You could surely download a porn jpg in under an HOUR with that thing. I wanted to be one of the first in Dallas to offer a BBS with a 9600 baud connection. To my knowledge there were only 2 that beat me. The online local power house User To User (9 phone lines!) and Gary Grosse’s Chrysalis. It was such a awesome sight to not only see your BBS in the Texas Computing BBS list, but also noting the asterisk in the legend, stating it supported 9600 baud!! Outstanding.
Now back to the early adopter tax. The only place back then to get bleeding edge technology locally was a place called Soft Warehouse, a huge computer store that had everything that you could imagine (they later changed their name to CompUSA, you may have heard of them). The only 9600 baud they carried at the time was the ATI (yes THAT ATI) 9600 external. I had a heart attack when I inquired about the price. But since the goal was to be one of the first in Dallas to offer the service, price was no issue. Below is the original receipt. It’s fascinating to me in two ways, one the outrageous price and two, it’s an original hand written receipt from CompUSA’s fledgling store.
A funny postscript to the story is something that I didn’t take into consideration, was the fact that to take advantage of the MASSIVE speed I had to offer, the other users had to have a expensive 9600 baud modem. It was a while before I saw the glorious “CONNECTED AT 9600 BAUD…”
Did I say I was one of the first???
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